When Daron Joffe dropped out of college to become an organic farmer, his parents cheered him on. “Okay, Farmer D, let’s see where this goes,” his mom said. He apprenticed on several organic farms in the Midwest, picked up biodynamic farming from Hugh Lovel at the Union Agriculture Institute, and eventually bought a 175-acre farm in Wisconsin where he launched a successful community supported agriculture (CSA) program. After several stints in the nonprofit world, Joffe was asked to help design and run an organic farm at one of the first “agrihoods” in the country, Serenbe. A planned community built around an organic farm, Serenbe was the beginning of Joffe’s career as an “entre-manure.

Essentially anyone who is committed in some way to improving our food system and the health of our planet through action. You can be a citizen farmer from a classroom, a kitchen, a board room, or the mayor’s office. You left your own farm in Wisconsin because you wanted to raise awareness about biodynamic agriculture among the masses.

How did you go from being a farmer to a farmer-activist?

I loved the CSA model—the farm as a platform for education and community building. But I felt that I wasn’t going to be able to make a big enough impact on my farm. And so, my first inclination was “I need to be more urban.” So I bought a food truck in Madison—it was a farm-to-table food truck (the falafel had heirloom tomatoes and fresh arugula from my farm)—and started doing more urban gardening. That kind of reinforced for me: [Cities] are where change needs to happen. I thought, “I’m going to sell the farm, and come back to farming later in life. But I need to devote this energetic time of life in communities that need it.”

After working at a few nonprofits, you found yourself becoming what you call an “entre-manure.” How did that transformation come about?

I had had this idea for years, of bringing the farm into the Jewish summer camp environment. It would be a way to get better food into the cafeteria, get kids connected to the environment and farming. I presented this idea to a Jewish Community Center, near where I was going to school in Georgia, and I managed to raise the money and build this garden that’s still there. It was a huge success.

One day, this development person from the JCC asked me to apply for a social entrepreneurship grant called the Joshua Venture Fellowship. It’s a two-year fellowship and they pick eight people from around the country. I got it. They gave me a mentor who was this guru of nonprofits. I sat down and had coffee with him. I said, “Here’s what I do: I design and build these gardens, train somebody to run them, and then I check in on them and then I’m done.”

And he said, “That sounds like a business. Why are you doing it as a nonprofit?”

I didn’t even realize it, but for those few years, I had been building my consulting expertise. When I got the opportunity to work at Serenbe, just southwest of Atlanta, I’d been doing it already.

Was Serenbe the first of these so-called “agrihoods”—planned communities built around a farm?

It was one of the first. There was Prairie Crossing, and a few really small things had happened—co-housing communities with small farms. But Serenbe was the first that had clustered, hamlet-style villages around a farm. It was also the first on this scale.

Though you’ve worked as a consultant on private developments around the country, you’ve kept doing pro bono work, building farms and gardens for homeless shelters, youth prisons, and boys & girls clubs. Is that part of your company’s mission?

My bread and butter clients are big developments and high-end resorts and I take on as much of the discounted nonprofit stuff that I can afford. I’m in a position now, in my new role [as ranch development director] at the Leichtag Foundation, where that’s more my core.

You say in your book that “most biodynamic farming lessons are no more mystical than The Farmers’ Almanac.” Is there a misconception about biodynamic farming?

The other day, I got an e-mail from an agroecology professor I worked for at the University of Georgia-Athens, to whom I’d sent a copy of the book. He wrote a wonderful review of the book and at the end of it he said, “I only have one criticism: The biodynamic subtitle. Organic agriculture has been scientifically proven and accepted by scientists. But biodynamic remains in the realm of superstition. It may be proven someday, but why not just call it the ‘organic way to grow healthy food?’”

And I can appreciate that. But last night I had a drink with a good friend of mine, who said, “I love that you have biodynamic on the cover of this book!”

So it’s important to shine a light on this; it has been a big part of my experience with agriculture. It brings a spiritual approach that I relate to; organics doesn’t necessarily have that component. From the science perspective, sure, organic agriculture is more developed and scientifically proven. But I’ve seen biodynamics in practice and I’ve seen it work. The book is not all about biodynamics, but my goal was to demystify it a bit, and show that it can be effective.

The latest Agriculture Census data shows that over half of America’s farmers don’t call farming their primary occupation—presumably because they can’t make enough money. What financial advice would you give young farmers?

Most farmers already know this: It’s a labor-of-love career. The quality of life is the richness that you get. My advice is to [prioritize] good planning, good management, delegate, and engage your customers so that they can participate as much as possible. Building a good team is key. And having somebody in the family that has a stable job is always a good thing! Farming is fickle, and you never know. So, have another creative revenue stream that’s not as dependent on the crop harvest–whether that’s something you do collectively as a family or via events, cooking, consulting, or whatever.

Find opportunities that can relieve some of the financial burden or provide you with stability. If you can work within an existing infrastructure—whether that’s an incubator or an existing agricultural or land trust operation where you could share equipment.

The last thing I would say is do a CSA. It provides you with low-risk seed capital.

Are there other entre-manurial ways of making a living as a farmer?

There are more and more farm management and educator roles out there. Universities are starting farms, and so are developers, nonprofits—even cities. And there are some ways to save money with government programs—subsidizing organic certification, or putting land into conservation easement to reduce taxes.

Where can farmers learn more about these programs?

ATTRA (National Sustainable Agricultural Information Service) is a government resources site for alternative farming. And SARE (Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education) program, lists grants. The USDA is also a good resource, too. There’s a whole beginning farmer section that helps identify resources; it’s amazing!

You went to 13 banks before you found one that would secure you a loan. Any tips?

Ha! Part of it was having a good business plan. I said: Here’s how a CSA works, and here’s my financial plan, and here’s my experience. And part of it was my dad guaranteeing the loan!

Today there are beginning farmer loans through the FSA (Farm Service Agency at the USDA), but there weren’t at the time. A lot of the banks just looked at my crop list and their eyes rolled back. “You’re not doing corn and soybeans?” They just did not understand it. There is a lot more support from social venture type funds now. Slow Money, for example. And lot of starter farms are being funded by angels–wealthy people who are passionate about this.

Aside from donating extra produce to the local food bank, what can citizen farmers do to get more healthy food into low-income neighborhoods?

Encourage vegetable gardening, especially in neighborhoods that lack access and resources. Some CSAs offer programs where you can sponsor a CSA share for a family in need. Advocate to local government, business, and community leaders about how important it is to get fresh food into low-income communities, schools, and shelters and support local sustainable agriculture.

Why did you decide to write a book?

I’ve always had a really hard time explaining what I do. So the book has been a good way to express my philosophy, my motivation, and my goals. My driving passion has always been to raise awareness and make change on a big scale; a book seemed like a great way to do that.

23 January 2014

This is my second post as food & ag blogger at Oregon Business Magazine.

Recently, I joined a friend for appetizers at Ava Gene’s, Stumptown Coffee founder Duane Sorenson’s celebrated new Italian restaurant on Division Street. One of Bon Appetit’s ten best new restaurants of 2013, Ava Gene’s was also Portland Monthly’s pick for top restaurant of 2013. (“With Ava Gene’s,” food critic Karen Brooks said, “Portland grows up. But rock and roll never dies.”) So I shouldn’t have been surprised to find it packed on a Sunday at 5 p.m.

But packed it was.

A few weeks later, I went to an industry wine tasting at Cathy Whim’s Pearl District boîte Oven & Shaker on a Thursday evening. It was fairly early — around 6PM — but the room was already buzzing with families, couples, and boisterous groups sharing wood-fired pizzas, insalata Nostrana, and bottles of chianti. After that, my husband and I went for dinner at Veritable Quandary, a Portland institution that’s been around since 1971. There wasn’t an empty table in the spot.

What’s going on here? Don’t get me wrong: I’m thrilled that Portland’s restaurants are thriving — and that a new place seems to open every week. About 500 restaurants and brewpubs opened in Oregon last year, the majority in Portland, according to OLCC records. As everybody knows, we have an incredibly vibrant culinary scene—with outstanding chef talent and unsurpassed locally sourced ingredients.

It just makes me wonder—who are these people who can afford to dine out several nights a week? They can’t all work for Adidas, Intel, or Nike — or some new tech start-up or innovation consultancy firm. Could it be, as Le Pigeon chef Gabe Rucker suggested recently in this San Francisco Chronicle interview, that dining has become our chosen form of entertainment? “People used to go out to dinner and a movie,” Rucker was quoted as saying. “Now, it’s like going out to dinner is the movie.”

The movement to label genetically modified foods suffered a major blow last month with the defeat of ballot measure 522 in Washington state, which would have required manufacturers to label foods containing GM ingredients.

So what does 522‘s defeat mean for the GM-labeling efforts in Oregon? Ivan Maluski at Friends of Family Farmers, a pro-labeling nonprofit that works on policy issues to protect socially responsible farming in Oregon, says his group will urge Oregon legislators to introduce a labeling law during the February session. “We believe the economic impact would be minimal and that the transparency would benefit consumers,” Maluski told me in an e-mail.

Scott Bates, director of GMO-Free Oregon and chief petitioner for a GM labeling initiative (that, if approved, will be on the ballot in 2014), says his group is also pushing the legislature to introduce a bill in February.

In Washington, many agricultural organizations opposed I-522—including the Washington State Farm Bureau and the Washington Association of Wheat Growers. Whether or not that means Oregon farmers and food processors will be in favor of a GM labeling law remains to be seen.

According to Oregon Department of Agriculture spokesman Bruce Pokarney, Oregon doesn’t grow a lot of GM crops — just sugar beet seed, alfalfa, some field corn, and a smattering of GM canola in eastern Oregon. Presumably that means that most Oregon farmers wouldn’t be impacted by a GM labeling law.

Eleven years ago, when GM labeling initiative Measure 27 tanked here in Oregon, an industry alliance called Oregonians for Food & Shelter opposed the measure. Their members include agriculture groups such as the Oregon Wheat Growers League and and the Oregon Farm Bureau as well as biotech companies including Syngenta, Monsanto, and DuPont.

Blake Rowe, CEO of the Oregon Wheat Growers League, says it’s hard to react to a potential Oregon initiative until he’s read the language but admits that the League — which advocates on behalf of thousands of Oregon wheat growers — would generally oppose a labeling initiative. “It’s just really hard to do something at the state level,” Rose says. “Especially when so much of commerce is at the national level.”

But Maluski says that for Oregon farmers — even conventional (i.e. non-organic) farmers — there’s actually an economic incentive for a labeling law. For example, Oregon farmers who grow non-organic wheat for export to Asia — nearly a $500 million market — already need to ensure that their wheat, though conventionally grown, is uncontaminated by GM crops. Otherwise, they risk losing their biggest market, as they temporarily did last summer after the GM wheat scare in eastern Oregon.

Will a labeling law increase costs for food manufacturers? Craig Ostbo, a managing partner at Portland-based marketing communications firm Koopman-Ostbo has worked on packaging changes for a range of Oregon companies including Kettle Chips, Bob’s Red Mill, Lochmead Farms, and Coconut Bliss. He says he’d be hard pressed to find an economic onus to adding “contains GM soy or corn” to an ingredient deck. “Companies change their packaging all the time,” Ostbo says — without increasing the price of their products. (See the “all natural” and “gluten-free” claims that have proliferated in recent years, not to mention Halloween-themed packaging for candy makers.) Food costs would likely go up if manufacturers chose to reformulate their products so as to avoid GM ingredients, as Michael Lipsky explains in this excellent Grist article.

Judging by what happened a decade ago with Measure 27, it’s not the Oregon farmers and food companies pro-labeling advocates need to worry about. Most of the $5 million spent on the “No” campaign for Measure 27 came from out-of-state corporations including Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, and Dow. Only a measly $5,500 came from Oregon businesses.

This time around, food-savvy Oregonians are more aware of GM foods, and a handful of deep-pocketed out-of-state donors like Whole Foods, Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap, the Organic Consumers Union, and Nature’s Path will likely help the pro-labeling side get its message out effectively. Crucially, Oregon’s 2014 general election is when Governor Kitzhaber is up for re-election, which will likely elicit a higher voter turn-out than Washington state had this fall, which was an off-year election.

“A decade is a long time,” says Maluski, referring to the failure of Measure 27. “Now, there’s a greater sense of people wanting to know how their food is being produced, whether with pesticide inputs or GM or other chemicals. Consumers want to make informed decisions.”

10 December 2013

Last week, Civil Eats published my story on restaurants that provide health insurance to all employees. My focus was on independent restaurants like Biwa and Xico that are boldly asking customers to kick in a little extra so that all workers—even bussers and dishwashers—can receive affordable health insurance. Response to the story was mixed: some local food businesses such as Grand Central Bakery pointed out that they, like Burgerville, have been offering health insurance (and paid sick days) to their employees for years. (My bad for not knowing this!) Local café Zell's apparently offers low-cost, high-quality health insurance, too. (Or so says one former employee, who notes that's why the kitchen staff hasn't changed for over a decade.) But most of the feedback I got was positive. Most restaurant-goers don't mind paying a bit extra if it ensures workers will have access to affordable health care.

Here's the story in its entirety:

Restaurant workers haul ass to provide us seasonal, delicious, safely-prepared food. And yet their meager wages—the typical restaurant worker makes $15,000 a year—are barely enough to pay their rent and groceries, let alone health insurance premiums. (This is especially true in the case of bussers and dishwashers, some of the least glamorous and lowest paying jobs in the restaurant industry.)

As members of the food movement, we seek out restaurants that serve fresh, local, organic ingredients, yet most of us don’t even know whether the workers who prepare and serve our food (and wash our dishes) get health insurance or paid sick leave.

That’s not the case at Biwa, a homestyle Japanese restaurant in Portland, Oregon. A few months ago, owner Gabe Rosen and his wife and business partner Kina Voelz took a gamble and began adding a five percent "Health & Wellness" charge to customers' bills to pay for their employees' health insurance. Whatever is left over goes into a fund for quarterly bonuses for Biwa's cooks and dishwashers.

The charge is very transparent—an explanation appears on the menu and again on your bill—and so far diners have been incredibly enthusiastic about paying it. “People like it,” says general manager Ed Ross in this short video (see above), noting that every night diners send back their bill with “awesome” and “this is great!” scribbled in the margins. “I think that people understand that it’s an issue,” says Ross.

Biwa covers every employee at the restaurant—from waiters to dishwashers—as long as they work 16.5 hours a week. The company pays 100 percent of the premium for the high-deductible plan. (If workers want a more comprehensive, lower deductible plan, they can get it, but have to chip in for the higher monthly premium.)

Rosen and Voelz have actually been paying their workers’ health insurance for a few years and they’ve offered one week of paid vacation per year to cooks and dishwashers since they opened in 2007. But the couple realized this summer—as premiums continued to soar—that they wouldn’t be able to do so for much longer unless they came up with a creative solution, fast.

They considered raising prices across the board. “But then we realized we could raise prices as a single line item and take this kind of boring business issue—that’s actually very important—and make the guests part of it,” says Rosen. The staff was initially concerned that the surcharge would mean stingier tips, but after a moment of head-scratching, according to Rosen, they bought into the idea. Rosen says that other than a handful of negative comments in online forums, customer feedback has been amazingly positive. “Tips have actually gone up!” he says.

At another Portland restaurant, a regional Mexican spot called Xico, the margaritas pay for health care. Or at least that’s what it says on the menu. Under the “Classic” Xico Margarita ($9)—made with Lunazul tequila, fresh lime juice, and triple sec—it reads: “Xico margaritas pay for full health care for our staff.”

But that’s not entirely accurate. Owner Liz Davis says she put this on the menu because the gross sales of margaritas matched what the company was already spending on health insurance. “We wanted to make it known that we were fully covering our employees,” says Davis.

Though employees have to work three months before they can get on Xico’s group plan, the company covers the entire monthly premium of $240 per month, no matter how few hours the employee works. It’s a fairly comprehensive plan from HMO Kaiser Permanente with $25 co-pays and low-cost prescriptions (generic drugs cost just $10). As with Biwa diners, Xico regulars seem more than happy to pitch in. “People get really excited about it and order more margaritas,” Davis says, laughing.

The average progressive Portlander may be happy to pay a little extra (or double down on their margaritas) to ensure restaurant workers get adequate medical care. But Saru Jayaraman, author of the exposé, “Behind the Kitchen Door,” doesn’t think consumers should be responsible for kitchen workers’ health insurance.

“Don’t get me wrong, I definitely applaud trying to provide health care and benefits,” says Jayaraman, who is the co-founder and director of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC), an organization committed to improving the wages and working conditions of the nation’s 10 million restaurant workers. “But this is an industry-wide problem. Restaurants need to be providing benefits—it’s not the responsibility of the customer to do that.”

When the Healthy San Francisco law passed in 2008, requiring San Francisco businesses with 20 employees or more to offer health insurance, many restaurants added a surcharge to customers’ bills. Reactions were all over the map from supportive (“Too many of my friends and family are without health care”) to outrage that diners were being taxed. “Incorporate all these expenses into menu prices,” wrote San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Michael Bauer. (A legal challenge against the program, which was filed by the Golden Gate Restaurant Association in 2006, was denied a hearing by the U.S. Supreme Court on June 29, 2010, legally clearing the program for continued existence for the foreseeable future.)

Then there's the issue of oversight. In May, 19 restaurants were accused of not using that extra money exlusively for workers' health insurance.

Jayaraman says plenty of restaurants manage to provide health insurance to their workers without passing the cost on to diners. “They’ve worked it into the efficiencies of the restaurant,” she says. “They say it actually reduces costs because it reduces turnover and increases productivity.”

Among the examples she gives are Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which offers subsidized health insurance for employees who work 30 hours a week (as long as they’ve been on staff for three months), “thrive-able” wages, paid time off, and matched 401(k) contributions.

Locavore fast food chain Burgerville—which has 39 restaurants in Washington and Oregon—has been offering workers comprehensive, affordable health care since 2006. To be eligible, employees must work 25 hours a week but once they do they only pay $30 a month. Health insurance kicks in after six months of employment.

“Chief cultural officer” Jack Graves attributes the low staff turnover at Burgerville—50 percent versus an industry average of over 100 percent—to this important benefit. “Offering health insurance got a lot of people insurance who had never had it before in their lives. It made people proud of where they’re working, proud that they can take care of their families in a manner that’s respectful,” he says.

Xico owner Liz Davis built the cost of health insurance into her business plan from the beginning, too, but she says the rising cost of health insurance—and the fact that she covers the full premium for even part-time employees after only three months on staff—means she may have to do something enterprising, like Biwa, to keep offering this benefit.

Lucky for her, Portland eaters are no longer satisfied with merely knowing the provenance of the chicken on the menu and whether it was humanely treated. They also want assurance that the restaurants they eat at treat their employees ethically—even if that means ordering another margarita.

Restaurant workers haul ass to provide us seasonal, delicious, safely-prepared food. And yet their meager wages—the typical restaurant worker makes $15,000 a year—are barely enough to pay their rent and groceries, let alone health insurance premiums. (This is especially true in the case of bussers and dishwashers, some of the least glamorous and lowest paying jobs in the restaurant industry.)

As members of the food movement, we seek out restaurants that serve fresh, local, organic ingredients, yet most of us don’t even know whether the workers who prepare and serve our food (and wash our dishes) get health insurance or paid sick leave.

That’s not the case at Biwa, a homestyle Japanese restaurant in Portland, Oregon. A few months ago, owner Gabe Rosen and his wife and business partner Kina Voelz took a gamble and began adding a five percent “Health & Wellness” charge to customers’ bills to pay for their employees’ health insurance. Whatever is left over goes into a fund for quarterly bonuses for Biwa’s cooks and dishwashers.

The charge is very transparent—an explanation appears on the menu and again on your bill—and so far diners have been incredibly enthusiastic about paying it. “People like it,” says general manager Ed Ross in this short video, noting that every night diners send back their bill with “awesome” and “this is great!” scribbled in the margins. “I think that people understand that it’s an issue,” says Ross.

Biwa covers every employee at the restaurant—from waiters to dishwashers—as long as they work 16.5 hours a week. The company pays 100 percent of the premium for the high-deductible plan. (If workers want a more comprehensive, lower deductible plan, they can get it, but have to chip in for the higher monthly premium.)

Rosen and Voelz have actually been paying their workers’ health insurance for a few years and they’ve offered one week of paid vacation per year to cooks and dishwashers since they opened in 2007. But the couple realized this summer—as premiums continued to soar—that they wouldn’t be able to do so for much longer unless they came up with a creative solution, fast.

They considered raising prices across the board. “But then we realized we could raise prices as a single line item and take this kind of boring business issue—that’s actually very important—and make the guests part of it,” says Rosen. The staff was initially concerned that the surcharge would mean stingier tips, but after a moment of head-scratching, according to Rosen, they bought into the idea. Rosen says that other than a handful of negative comments in online forums, customer feedback has been amazingly positive. “Tips have actually gone up!” he says.

At another Portland restaurant, a regional Mexican spot called Xico, the margaritas pay for health care. Or at least that’s what it says on the menu. Under the “Classic” Xico Margarita ($9)—made with Lunazul tequila, fresh lime juice, and triple sec—it reads: “Xico margaritas pay for full health care for our staff.”

But that’s not entirely accurate. Owner Liz Davis says she put this on the menu because the gross sales of margaritas matched what the company was already spending on health insurance. “We wanted to make it known that we were fully covering our employees,” says Davis.

Though employees have to work three months before they can get on Xico’s group plan, the company covers the entire monthly premium of $240 per month, no matter how few hours the employee works. It’s a fairly comprehensive plan from HMO Kaiser Permanente with $25 co-pays and low-cost prescriptions (generic drugs cost just $10). As with Biwa diners, Xico regulars seem more than happy to pitch in. “People get really excited about it and order more margaritas,” Davis says, laughing.

The average progressive Portlander may be happy to pay a little extra (or double down on their margaritas) to ensure restaurant workers get adequate medical care. But Saru Jayaraman, author of the exposé, “Behind the Kitchen Door,” doesn’t think consumers should be responsible for kitchen workers’ health insurance.

“Don’t get me wrong, I definitely applaud trying to provide health care and benefits,” says Jayaraman, who is the co-founder and director of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC), an organization committed to improving the wages and working conditions of the nation’s 10 million restaurant workers. “But this is an industry-wide problem. Restaurants need to be providing benefits—it’s not the responsibility of the customer to do that.”

Then there’s the issue of trust. When the Healthy San Francisco law passed in 2008, requiring businesses there with 20 employees or more to offer health insurance, many restaurants added a surcharge to customers’ bills. Reactions were all over the map from supportive–“Too many of my friends and family are without health care”–to outrage that diners were being taxed, with San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Michael Bauer writing: “Incorporate all these expenses into menu prices.”

(A legal challenge against the program, which was filed by the Golden Gate Restaurant Association in 2006, was denied a hearing by the U.S. Supreme Court on June 29, 2010, legally clearing the program for continued existence for the foreseeable future.)

Then there’s the issue of oversight: In May, 19 restaurants were accused of not using that extra money exclusively for workers’ health insurance.

Jayaraman says plenty of restaurants manage to provide health insurance to their workers without passing the cost on to diners. “They’ve worked it into the efficiencies of the restaurant,” she says. “They say it actually reduces costs because it reduces turnover and increases productivity.”

Among the examples she gives are Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which offers subsidized health insurance for employees who work 30 hours a week (as long as they’ve been on staff for three months), “thrive-able” wages, paid time off, and matched 401(k) contributions.

Russell Street Deli in Detroit’s Eastern Market is another model employer. The deli offers living wages, health insurance, and an IRA program. ROC’s 2012 report Taking the High Road: a How-to Guide for Successful Restaurant Employers singles out a few other businesses that provide some form of health insurance for workers: Tom Colicchio’s Craft restaurant group in New York, Busboys & Poets in D.C., and Avalon International Breads in Detroit. “But many, many others provide health insurance; many provide full coverage, but the quality of the insurance varies,” notes Jayaraman.

Locavore fast food chain Burgerville—which has 39 restaurants in Washington and Oregon—has been offering workers comprehensive, affordable health care since 2006. To be eligible, employees must work 25 hours a week but once they do they only pay $30 a month. Health insurance kicks in after six months of employment.

“Chief cultural officer” Jack Graves attributes the low staff turnover at Burgerville—50 percent versus an industry average of over 100 percent—to this important benefit. “Offering health insurance got a lot of people insurance who had never had it before in their lives. It made people proud of where they’re working, proud that they can take care of their families in a manner that’s respectful,” he says.

Xico owner Liz Davis built the cost of health insurance into her business plan from the beginning, too, but she says the rising cost of health insurance—and the fact that she covers the full premium for even part-time employees after only three months on staff—means she may have to do something enterprising, like Biwa, to keep offering this benefit.

- See more at: http://civileats.com/2013/12/03/health-on-the-menu-in-the-pacific-northwest/#sthash.t1P5XMYg.dpuf

workers haul ass to provide us seasonal, delicious, safely-prepared food. And yet their meager wages—the typical restaurant worker makes $15,000 a year—are barely enough to pay their rent and groceries, let alone health insurance premiums. (This is especially true in the case of bussers and dishwashers, some of the least glamorous and lowest paying jobs in the restaurant industry.)

As members of the food movement, we seek out restaurants that serve fresh, local, organic ingredients, yet most of us don’t even know whether the workers who prepare and serve our food (and wash our dishes) get health insurance or paid sick leave.

That’s not the case at Biwa, a homestyle Japanese restaurant in Portland, Oregon. A few months ago, owner Gabe Rosen and his wife and business partner Kina Voelz took a gamble and began adding a five percent “Health & Wellness” charge to customers’ bills to pay for their employees’ health insurance. Whatever is left over goes into a fund for quarterly bonuses for Biwa’s cooks and dishwashers.

The charge is very transparent—an explanation appears on the menu and again on your bill—and so far diners have been incredibly enthusiastic about paying it. “People like it,” says general manager Ed Ross in this short video, noting that every night diners send back their bill with “awesome” and “this is great!” scribbled in the margins. “I think that people understand that it’s an issue,” says Ross.

Biwa covers every employee at the restaurant—from waiters to dishwashers—as long as they work 16.5 hours a week. The company pays 100 percent of the premium for the high-deductible plan. (If workers want a more comprehensive, lower deductible plan, they can get it, but have to chip in for the higher monthly premium.)

Rosen and Voelz have actually been paying their workers’ health insurance for a few years and they’ve offered one week of paid vacation per year to cooks and dishwashers since they opened in 2007. But the couple realized this summer—as premiums continued to soar—that they wouldn’t be able to do so for much longer unless they came up with a creative solution, fast.

They considered raising prices across the board. “But then we realized we could raise prices as a single line item and take this kind of boring business issue—that’s actually very important—and make the guests part of it,” says Rosen. The staff was initially concerned that the surcharge would mean stingier tips, but after a moment of head-scratching, according to Rosen, they bought into the idea. Rosen says that other than a handful of negative comments in online forums, customer feedback has been amazingly positive. “Tips have actually gone up!” he says.

At another Portland restaurant, a regional Mexican spot called Xico, the margaritas pay for health care. Or at least that’s what it says on the menu. Under the “Classic” Xico Margarita ($9)—made with Lunazul tequila, fresh lime juice, and triple sec—it reads: “Xico margaritas pay for full health care for our staff.”

But that’s not entirely accurate. Owner Liz Davis says she put this on the menu because the gross sales of margaritas matched what the company was already spending on health insurance. “We wanted to make it known that we were fully covering our employees,” says Davis.

Though employees have to work three months before they can get on Xico’s group plan, the company covers the entire monthly premium of $240 per month, no matter how few hours the employee works. It’s a fairly comprehensive plan from HMO Kaiser Permanente with $25 co-pays and low-cost prescriptions (generic drugs cost just $10). As with Biwa diners, Xico regulars seem more than happy to pitch in. “People get really excited about it and order more margaritas,” Davis says, laughing.

The average progressive Portlander may be happy to pay a little extra (or double down on their margaritas) to ensure restaurant workers get adequate medical care. But Saru Jayaraman, author of the exposé, “Behind the Kitchen Door,” doesn’t think consumers should be responsible for kitchen workers’ health insurance.

“Don’t get me wrong, I definitely applaud trying to provide health care and benefits,” says Jayaraman, who is the co-founder and director of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC), an organization committed to improving the wages and working conditions of the nation’s 10 million restaurant workers. “But this is an industry-wide problem. Restaurants need to be providing benefits—it’s not the responsibility of the customer to do that.”

Then there’s the issue of trust. When the Healthy San Francisco law passed in 2008, requiring businesses there with 20 employees or more to offer health insurance, many restaurants added a surcharge to customers’ bills. Reactions were all over the map from supportive–“Too many of my friends and family are without health care”–to outrage that diners were being taxed, with San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Michael Bauer writing: “Incorporate all these expenses into menu prices.”

(A legal challenge against the program, which was filed by the Golden Gate Restaurant Association in 2006, was denied a hearing by the U.S. Supreme Court on June 29, 2010, legally clearing the program for continued existence for the foreseeable future.)

Then there’s the issue of oversight: In May, 19 restaurants were accused of not using that extra money exclusively for workers’ health insurance.

Jayaraman says plenty of restaurants manage to provide health insurance to their workers without passing the cost on to diners. “They’ve worked it into the efficiencies of the restaurant,” she says. “They say it actually reduces costs because it reduces turnover and increases productivity.”

Among the examples she gives are Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which offers subsidized health insurance for employees who work 30 hours a week (as long as they’ve been on staff for three months), “thrive-able” wages, paid time off, and matched 401(k) contributions.

Russell Street Deli in Detroit’s Eastern Market is another model employer. The deli offers living wages, health insurance, and an IRA program. ROC’s 2012 report Taking the High Road: a How-to Guide for Successful Restaurant Employers singles out a few other businesses that provide some form of health insurance for workers: Tom Colicchio’s Craft restaurant group in New York, Busboys & Poets in D.C., and Avalon International Breads in Detroit. “But many, many others provide health insurance; many provide full coverage, but the quality of the insurance varies,” notes Jayaraman.

Locavore fast food chain Burgerville—which has 39 restaurants in Washington and Oregon—has been offering workers comprehensive, affordable health care since 2006. To be eligible, employees must work 25 hours a week but once they do they only pay $30 a month. Health insurance kicks in after six months of employment.

“Chief cultural officer” Jack Graves attributes the low staff turnover at Burgerville—50 percent versus an industry average of over 100 percent—to this important benefit. “Offering health insurance got a lot of people insurance who had never had it before in their lives. It made people proud of where they’re working, proud that they can take care of their families in a manner that’s respectful,” he says.

Xico owner Liz Davis built the cost of health insurance into her business plan from the beginning, too, but she says the rising cost of health insurance—and the fact that she covers the full premium for even part-time employees after only three months on staff—means she may have to do something enterprising, like Biwa, to keep offering this benefit.

Lucky for her, Portland eaters are no longer satisfied with merely knowing the provenance of the chicken on the menu and whether it was humanely treated. They also want assurance that the restaurants they eat at treat their employees ethically—even if that means ordering another margarita.

- See more at: http://civileats.com/2013/12/03/health-on-the-menu-in-the-pacific-northwest/#sthash.t1P5XMYg.dpuf

Restaurant workers haul ass to provide us seasonal, delicious, safely-prepared food. And yet their meager wages—the typical restaurant worker makes $15,000 a year—are barely enough to pay their rent and groceries, let alone health insurance premiums. (This is especially true in the case of bussers and dishwashers, some of the least glamorous and lowest paying jobs in the restaurant industry.)

As members of the food movement, we seek out restaurants that serve fresh, local, organic ingredients, yet most of us don’t even know whether the workers who prepare and serve our food (and wash our dishes) get health insurance or paid sick leave.

That’s not the case at Biwa, a homestyle Japanese restaurant in Portland, Oregon. A few months ago, owner Gabe Rosen and his wife and business partner Kina Voelz took a gamble and began adding a five percent “Health & Wellness” charge to customers’ bills to pay for their employees’ health insurance. Whatever is left over goes into a fund for quarterly bonuses for Biwa’s cooks and dishwashers.

The charge is very transparent—an explanation appears on the menu and again on your bill—and so far diners have been incredibly enthusiastic about paying it. “People like it,” says general manager Ed Ross in this short video, noting that every night diners send back their bill with “awesome” and “this is great!” scribbled in the margins. “I think that people understand that it’s an issue,” says Ross.

Biwa covers every employee at the restaurant—from waiters to dishwashers—as long as they work 16.5 hours a week. The company pays 100 percent of the premium for the high-deductible plan. (If workers want a more comprehensive, lower deductible plan, they can get it, but have to chip in for the higher monthly premium.)

Rosen and Voelz have actually been paying their workers’ health insurance for a few years and they’ve offered one week of paid vacation per year to cooks and dishwashers since they opened in 2007. But the couple realized this summer—as premiums continued to soar—that they wouldn’t be able to do so for much longer unless they came up with a creative solution, fast.

They considered raising prices across the board. “But then we realized we could raise prices as a single line item and take this kind of boring business issue—that’s actually very important—and make the guests part of it,” says Rosen. The staff was initially concerned that the surcharge would mean stingier tips, but after a moment of head-scratching, according to Rosen, they bought into the idea. Rosen says that other than a handful of negative comments in online forums, customer feedback has been amazingly positive. “Tips have actually gone up!” he says.

At another Portland restaurant, a regional Mexican spot called Xico, the margaritas pay for health care. Or at least that’s what it says on the menu. Under the “Classic” Xico Margarita ($9)—made with Lunazul tequila, fresh lime juice, and triple sec—it reads: “Xico margaritas pay for full health care for our staff.”

But that’s not entirely accurate. Owner Liz Davis says she put this on the menu because the gross sales of margaritas matched what the company was already spending on health insurance. “We wanted to make it known that we were fully covering our employees,” says Davis.

Though employees have to work three months before they can get on Xico’s group plan, the company covers the entire monthly premium of $240 per month, no matter how few hours the employee works. It’s a fairly comprehensive plan from HMO Kaiser Permanente with $25 co-pays and low-cost prescriptions (generic drugs cost just $10). As with Biwa diners, Xico regulars seem more than happy to pitch in. “People get really excited about it and order more margaritas,” Davis says, laughing.

The average progressive Portlander may be happy to pay a little extra (or double down on their margaritas) to ensure restaurant workers get adequate medical care. But Saru Jayaraman, author of the exposé, “Behind the Kitchen Door,” doesn’t think consumers should be responsible for kitchen workers’ health insurance.

“Don’t get me wrong, I definitely applaud trying to provide health care and benefits,” says Jayaraman, who is the co-founder and director of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC), an organization committed to improving the wages and working conditions of the nation’s 10 million restaurant workers. “But this is an industry-wide problem. Restaurants need to be providing benefits—it’s not the responsibility of the customer to do that.”

Then there’s the issue of trust. When the Healthy San Francisco law passed in 2008, requiring businesses there with 20 employees or more to offer health insurance, many restaurants added a surcharge to customers’ bills. Reactions were all over the map from supportive–“Too many of my friends and family are without health care”–to outrage that diners were being taxed, with San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Michael Bauer writing: “Incorporate all these expenses into menu prices.”

(A legal challenge against the program, which was filed by the Golden Gate Restaurant Association in 2006, was denied a hearing by the U.S. Supreme Court on June 29, 2010, legally clearing the program for continued existence for the foreseeable future.)

Then there’s the issue of oversight: In May, 19 restaurants were accused of not using that extra money exclusively for workers’ health insurance.

Jayaraman says plenty of restaurants manage to provide health insurance to their workers without passing the cost on to diners. “They’ve worked it into the efficiencies of the restaurant,” she says. “They say it actually reduces costs because it reduces turnover and increases productivity.”

Among the examples she gives are Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which offers subsidized health insurance for employees who work 30 hours a week (as long as they’ve been on staff for three months), “thrive-able” wages, paid time off, and matched 401(k) contributions.

Russell Street Deli in Detroit’s Eastern Market is another model employer. The deli offers living wages, health insurance, and an IRA program. ROC’s 2012 report Taking the High Road: a How-to Guide for Successful Restaurant Employers singles out a few other businesses that provide some form of health insurance for workers: Tom Colicchio’s Craft restaurant group in New York, Busboys & Poets in D.C., and Avalon International Breads in Detroit. “But many, many others provide health insurance; many provide full coverage, but the quality of the insurance varies,” notes Jayaraman.

Locavore fast food chain Burgerville—which has 39 restaurants in Washington and Oregon—has been offering workers comprehensive, affordable health care since 2006. To be eligible, employees must work 25 hours a week but once they do they only pay $30 a month. Health insurance kicks in after six months of employment.

“Chief cultural officer” Jack Graves attributes the low staff turnover at Burgerville—50 percent versus an industry average of over 100 percent—to this important benefit. “Offering health insurance got a lot of people insurance who had never had it before in their lives. It made people proud of where they’re working, proud that they can take care of their families in a manner that’s respectful,” he says.

Xico owner Liz Davis built the cost of health insurance into her business plan from the beginning, too, but she says the rising cost of health insurance—and the fact that she covers the full premium for even part-time employees after only three months on staff—means she may have to do something enterprising, like Biwa, to keep offering this benefit.

Lucky for her, Portland eaters are no longer satisfied with merely knowing the provenance of the chicken on the menu and whether it was humanely treated. They also want assurance that the restaurants they eat at treat their employees ethically—even if that means ordering another margarita.

- See more at: http://civileats.com/2013/12/03/health-on-the-menu-in-the-pacific-northwest/#sthash.t1P5XMYg.dpuf

Restaurant workers haul ass to provide us seasonal, delicious, safely-prepared food. And yet their meager wages—the typical restaurant worker makes $15,000 a year—are barely enough to pay their rent and groceries, let alone health insurance premiums. (This is especially true in the case of bussers and dishwashers, some of the least glamorous and lowest paying jobs in the restaurant industry.)

As members of the food movement, we seek out restaurants that serve fresh, local, organic ingredients, yet most of us don’t even know whether the workers who prepare and serve our food (and wash our dishes) get health insurance or paid sick leave.

That’s not the case at Biwa, a homestyle Japanese restaurant in Portland, Oregon. A few months ago, owner Gabe Rosen and his wife and business partner Kina Voelz took a gamble and began adding a five percent “Health & Wellness” charge to customers’ bills to pay for their employees’ health insurance. Whatever is left over goes into a fund for quarterly bonuses for Biwa’s cooks and dishwashers.

The charge is very transparent—an explanation appears on the menu and again on your bill—and so far diners have been incredibly enthusiastic about paying it. “People like it,” says general manager Ed Ross in this short video, noting that every night diners send back their bill with “awesome” and “this is great!” scribbled in the margins. “I think that people understand that it’s an issue,” says Ross.

Biwa covers every employee at the restaurant—from waiters to dishwashers—as long as they work 16.5 hours a week. The company pays 100 percent of the premium for the high-deductible plan. (If workers want a more comprehensive, lower deductible plan, they can get it, but have to chip in for the higher monthly premium.)

Rosen and Voelz have actually been paying their workers’ health insurance for a few years and they’ve offered one week of paid vacation per year to cooks and dishwashers since they opened in 2007. But the couple realized this summer—as premiums continued to soar—that they wouldn’t be able to do so for much longer unless they came up with a creative solution, fast.

They considered raising prices across the board. “But then we realized we could raise prices as a single line item and take this kind of boring business issue—that’s actually very important—and make the guests part of it,” says Rosen. The staff was initially concerned that the surcharge would mean stingier tips, but after a moment of head-scratching, according to Rosen, they bought into the idea. Rosen says that other than a handful of negative comments in online forums, customer feedback has been amazingly positive. “Tips have actually gone up!” he says.

At another Portland restaurant, a regional Mexican spot called Xico, the margaritas pay for health care. Or at least that’s what it says on the menu. Under the “Classic” Xico Margarita ($9)—made with Lunazul tequila, fresh lime juice, and triple sec—it reads: “Xico margaritas pay for full health care for our staff.”

But that’s not entirely accurate. Owner Liz Davis says she put this on the menu because the gross sales of margaritas matched what the company was already spending on health insurance. “We wanted to make it known that we were fully covering our employees,” says Davis.

Though employees have to work three months before they can get on Xico’s group plan, the company covers the entire monthly premium of $240 per month, no matter how few hours the employee works. It’s a fairly comprehensive plan from HMO Kaiser Permanente with $25 co-pays and low-cost prescriptions (generic drugs cost just $10). As with Biwa diners, Xico regulars seem more than happy to pitch in. “People get really excited about it and order more margaritas,” Davis says, laughing.

The average progressive Portlander may be happy to pay a little extra (or double down on their margaritas) to ensure restaurant workers get adequate medical care. But Saru Jayaraman, author of the exposé, “Behind the Kitchen Door,” doesn’t think consumers should be responsible for kitchen workers’ health insurance.

“Don’t get me wrong, I definitely applaud trying to provide health care and benefits,” says Jayaraman, who is the co-founder and director of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC), an organization committed to improving the wages and working conditions of the nation’s 10 million restaurant workers. “But this is an industry-wide problem. Restaurants need to be providing benefits—it’s not the responsibility of the customer to do that.”

Then there’s the issue of trust. When the Healthy San Francisco law passed in 2008, requiring businesses there with 20 employees or more to offer health insurance, many restaurants added a surcharge to customers’ bills. Reactions were all over the map from supportive–“Too many of my friends and family are without health care”–to outrage that diners were being taxed, with San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Michael Bauer writing: “Incorporate all these expenses into menu prices.”

(A legal challenge against the program, which was filed by the Golden Gate Restaurant Association in 2006, was denied a hearing by the U.S. Supreme Court on June 29, 2010, legally clearing the program for continued existence for the foreseeable future.)

Then there’s the issue of oversight: In May, 19 restaurants were accused of not using that extra money exclusively for workers’ health insurance.

Jayaraman says plenty of restaurants manage to provide health insurance to their workers without passing the cost on to diners. “They’ve worked it into the efficiencies of the restaurant,” she says. “They say it actually reduces costs because it reduces turnover and increases productivity.”

Among the examples she gives are Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which offers subsidized health insurance for employees who work 30 hours a week (as long as they’ve been on staff for three months), “thrive-able” wages, paid time off, and matched 401(k) contributions.

Russell Street Deli in Detroit’s Eastern Market is another model employer. The deli offers living wages, health insurance, and an IRA program. ROC’s 2012 report Taking the High Road: a How-to Guide for Successful Restaurant Employers singles out a few other businesses that provide some form of health insurance for workers: Tom Colicchio’s Craft restaurant group in New York, Busboys & Poets in D.C., and Avalon International Breads in Detroit. “But many, many others provide health insurance; many provide full coverage, but the quality of the insurance varies,” notes Jayaraman.

Locavore fast food chain Burgerville—which has 39 restaurants in Washington and Oregon—has been offering workers comprehensive, affordable health care since 2006. To be eligible, employees must work 25 hours a week but once they do they only pay $30 a month. Health insurance kicks in after six months of employment.

“Chief cultural officer” Jack Graves attributes the low staff turnover at Burgerville—50 percent versus an industry average of over 100 percent—to this important benefit. “Offering health insurance got a lot of people insurance who had never had it before in their lives. It made people proud of where they’re working, proud that they can take care of their families in a manner that’s respectful,” he says.

Xico owner Liz Davis built the cost of health insurance into her business plan from the beginning, too, but she says the rising cost of health insurance—and the fact that she covers the full premium for even part-time employees after only three months on staff—means she may have to do something enterprising, like Biwa, to keep offering this benefit.

Lucky for her, Portland eaters are no longer satisfied with merely knowing the provenance of the chicken on the menu and whether it was humanely treated. They also want assurance that the restaurants they eat at treat their employees ethically—even if that means ordering another margarita.

- See more at: http://civileats.com/2013/12/03/health-on-the-menu-in-the-pacific-northwest/#sthash.t1P5XMYg.dpuf

11 November 2013

Most farmers would rather be
knee-deep in dirt than rustling up business with school food buyers and
James Beard-award-winning chefs.

Lucky for marketing-shy farmers, in recent years a new tool has
cropped up to make life easier: online food hubs. Unlike physical food
hubs—central facilities that aggregate, distribute, and market food for
farmers — online food hubs are more akin to dating web sites,
efficiently connecting local food producers (farmers, ranchers,
fishermen, dairies, brewers, etc.) with wholesale buyers (restaurants,
grocers, schools, hotels, and hospitals). Think of them as the Match.com
of the food world. A farmer posts his crop on his site— “Our 9 acres of
biodynamic blueberries will be available for purchase in mid to late
June” — and a local chef may see the posting and send an internal e-mail
to the farmer telling her to reserve two palettes of Earliblue. Online
food hubs allow food producers who might have once hired a sales or PR
person to keep more of every dollar they earn.

The Food-Hub.org Homepage

The paragon of online food hubs, Food-Hub.org, was created by the Portland, Oregon-based environmental think tank Ecotrust.
Many enduring matches have been made on FoodHub.org, which launched in
February 2010, and already has nearly 5000 members in the Pacific
Northwest. Here’s how it works. A producer, such as Davidson
Commodities in Spokane, Washington, will post something under
“Marketplace.” “Available: GMO-free specialty lentils, garbanzo beans
and split peas.” In this case, Portland’s Grand Central Bakery and SoupCycle (a soup delivery service that delivers soup by bike) both saw the posting and sent an internal e-mail to Davidson Commodities.

Think of them as the Match.com of the food world.

Now, both companies buy their beans from Davidson. (Food-Hub.org does
not orchestrate deliveries but sellers can specify if they include
delivery or if they prefer on-farm pick-up.) Buyers can post want ads,
too. The director of child nutrition at the Wahluke School District in
central Washington posted on Food-Hub.org that she needed local tomatoes
and cucumbers. She was contacted by Bella Terra Gardens, 30 miles away,
and pre-ordered enough produce to fill the salad bars at the district’s
five schools. Food-Hub.org also has a special feature called a “hot
sheet” where sellers can post what’s in abundance (or “hot). At press
time, Dancing Roots Farms in Troutdale, Oregon, was eager to move arugula and several varieties of kale.

The site has become an invaluable tool for busy farmers who often are
clueless as to which restaurants, schools, or pubs to target. “Most
producers are in rural areas and the buyers are in urban areas, and
producers often don’t know who the chefs are, or who the food service
folks are. It collapses all that research time,” says Amanda Oborne,
director of Food & Farms at Ecotrust.

The concept of online food hubs has taken root in the U.S. — where a
dozen similar sites have launched in recent years from Michigan to
Nevada. But these sites are starting to spread in other countries, too.
Inspired by Portland’s Food-Hub.org, the Canadian environmental
non-profit GreenBelt launched Ontario Fresh two years ago.

Mark Kenny, Lead Purchaser for Ontario Fresh, handing off Ontario produce to his chef at the University of Guelph.

Thus far, the site has attracted nearly 2,000 members from all over the province. In the United Kingdom, there’s FoodTrade,
which launched in Beta last winter and already has about 500 members.
Though most members are UK- based, Founder Ed Dowding has dreams of
going global. “If we do it right, we can trade internationally perfectly
sustainably, and should do so,” he says. “Local is only part of the
answer.”

Though online food hubs have their limitations — most don’t provide
distribution or a central pick-up location — they are creating new
business opportunities for rural growers and food producers at the click
of a mouse.

29 October 2013

Students at West Tisbury School on Martha's Vineyard get fish chowder and fresh veggies (Photo by Elizabeth Cecil)

School cafeteria food gets a bad rap. But the truth is, as the national farm to school movement has
taken off over the past few years, schools have begun sourcing the sort
of high-quality ingredients you see at your local farmers’ market. At
public school lunch rooms around the country, it’s now possible to taste
dishes like shrimp cocktail (with homemade cocktail sauce), grass-fed
burgers with roasted potatoes, and burrito bowls with local veggies and
antibiotic-free chicken. Realizing how vital farm-to-school programs are
to local economies, state governments from Alaska to Texas
are encouraging regional purchasing, in some cases doling out grants to
districts that want to buy more local and regional food.

The Obama administration has stepped up its support, hiring a
director of farm-to-school at the United States Department of
Agriculture and, last fall, allocating $4.5 million in grants to 68 projects that connect school cafeterias with local agricultural producers. In fact, according to just-released Census figures
from the USDA, 38,629 schools across the U.S. are buying local food and
teaching kids where their food comes from. And then there are
nonprofits like FoodCorps,
which deploys idealistic young service members—125 of them at last
count—to 15 states to teach kids about healthy food, instruct them in
gardening and cooking, and help school food directors get more local
food into schools (including, sometimes, the very produce kids grow
themselves).

Since October is National Farm to School Month,
we decided to showcase some of the yummiest locally sourced cafeteria
meals out there. We bet you’ll take a second look at your kid’s
cafeteria—and maybe even join her for lunch some day soon.

Read the rest of my story—and see a slideshow of amazing cafeteria meals from New York City to Tennesee —on BonAppétit.com.

29 April 2013

Last Friday, April 26th, Bon Appetit published my post, which they entitled "Yes, You Can Feed a Family of 3 All Organic On a Food Stamp Budget." I'm re-publishing it here in its entirety, even though some of it will be old hat to those of you who've been reading my installments here.

It was exciting to write about this for a publication that doesn't often cover food justice issues and thus far, the feedback has been positive. I've gotten a few effusive letters from readers who have been on food stamps and also managed to feed their families a healthy, plant-based diet (if not all organic). They were pleased to see such tips on Bon Appetit's site.

A small selection of the produce available at Portland's main farmers' market

Here's the post:

When I tell people that my fiancé, Don, and I did an all-organic food stamp challenge for Lent this year, they are incredulous.

"That must've been impossible, right?" they say. "Organic food is SO expensive!"

But
these doubters were wrong. For six weeks—the entire Lenten period—Don
and I shopped frugally, cooked at home, and went without luxuries like
beer, ice cream, soda, bottled salad dressing, and (horror of horrors!)
Stumptown Coffee. But we ate nourishing, fulfilling meals—some of them
more inspired than what we regularly cook—and I'm proud to report that we stayed within our budget of $526 a month for a family of three, with a few dollars to spare.

A word about our budget. Unlike most people
who take the food stamp challenge, we chose to limit ourselves to the
maximum Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, i.e. food
stamps) allowance for a family of three: $526. (Don's 8-year-old
daughter, Madeleine—who eats a heck of a lot of organic Fuji
apples—lives with us half the time.) Though this put us far ahead of
most Americans who are on SNAP--nearly 60 percent of participating households receive less than the maximum
and are expected to make up the difference with their own income. It
also meant that we couldn't use any "extra" money for groceries. (The
USDA expects SNAP recipients to spend 30 percent of their own resources on groceries.
People who are poor enough to qualify for the maximum benefit spend
proportionately less out of their own pockets on groceries.)

I won't go into all the ground rules here (you can read about them in my first blog post)
except to say we allowed ourselves to use up whatever was already in
our cupboard (or fridge) before the challenge began—organic or not. We
already had olive oil, spices, sour cream, almond butter, and basic
staples like flour, lentils, and rice. That said, we did the challenge
for six weeks (most people, like Cory Booker, do it for a mere week) so we did end up replacing these items during Lent using our lower budget.

How did we manage to stay within our budget? Let me be the first to say
that we have many privileges. We live in southeast Portland, OR, within
walking distance of three full-service grocery stories (Safeway, Fred
Meyer, and a New Seasons),
one gourmet grocery (Pastaworks), and a farm stand/fishmonger's.
Portland is a veritable food oasis—our micro-neighborhood especially
so. Second, Don and I both know our way around the kitchen and love to
cook. Third, I work from home, which makes it easy to roast vegetables,
whip up a batch of pizza dough, or start a soup as I go about my work
day. (Office workers may run errands on their lunch break; I start
preparing dinner.)

That said, with some effort and planning,
eating an entirely organic diet on this budget was not as difficult as
you'd think. A few money-saving tips:

Buy in bulk! Like
practiced hippies, we go to the grocery store armed with old yogurt
containers, which we use for dried beans, quinoa, nuts, pasta, etc. It's
much cheaper than buying packaged staples—plus, you reduce waste.

Look for sales.
We get a circular in the mail each week from New Seasons that trumpets
weekly deals. Organic fuji apples: $1.49 a pound. Organic whole wheat
bread: two loaves, $5. Build your meals around the sale items—and
what's in season.

Shop at the farmers' market. Okay, so we
have some of the country's best farmers' markets in Portland—with
competitive prices. Stick to produce, and you'll be surprised by how much booty you'll walk away with for just $25. (Many farmers' markets nationwide accept food stamps; some even have matching programs that give food stamp shoppers up to $20 extra to spend at the market.)

Buy lower-case "o" organic.
I don't want to cause a major kerfuffle here, but I'm of the opinion
that if you can talk to the farmer and ask her or him whether or not
they use herbicides or pesticides and they look you in the eye and say
they don't, then their produce is just as good as certified organic.
It's often cheaper, too. Eat meat sparingly. We're a
vegetarian household most days, but during the challenge we ate even
less meat (including fish and seafood) than usual. Organic meat and
poultry are a lot more expensive than conventional (as they should be),
but for that reason, we avoided both. One night, Madeleine and I made an exception for New Seasons' grass-fed
ground beef (from a ranch that does not use sub-therapeutic antibiotics);
it was $6 a pound—how could we resist?

Love your leftovers.
Knowing we had no extra money to spare, we made a special effort not to
waste anything. Leftover beans went on top of a salad or into a
garlicky hummus. Cauliflower macaroni and cheese was re-heated for the
next day's lunch. Remnants of last night's salmon went into a hearty
mushroom-and-cheese omelette. Multi-grain waffles (made Saturday
morning) are frozen and re-heated for breakfast throughout the week.
Delicious all!

The
most universally popular meal I made during the challenge was also the
easiest and the cheapest. (Let that be a lesson to us all.) No, not rice
and beans. A baked potato bar! I got the idea from Jenny Rosenstrach
and Andy Ward, who write Bon Appetit's The Providers.

Here's the non-recipe recipe:

Baked Potato Bar

Ingredients

1 russet potato for each person Toppings:
grated cheddar cheese, sour cream, an onion, black beans, cooked
broccoli, sauteed spinach, and anything else you have in your fridge
that might be good on a potato

Preparation

In a 450-degree
oven, bake the potatoes, placing them directly on the oven rack. (No
need to wrap them in foil.) Let bake for 50 minutes or until tender.
Meanwhile, cut the onion into thin slices and cook slowly in about 1/4
cup olive oil in a large skillet over low heat. Season to taste with
salt and pepper. Stir occasionally so onions don't burn. It'll take
20-30 minutes, but the results are astonishing: a sweet, golden brown,
deliciously goopy mass of onion.

When the potatoes are done, slice each one horizontally and butter both halves. Serve with toppings.

The
results surprised me. Don kept saying, "This is so delicious!" And even
picky eater Madeleine "mmmed" as she ate her potato (most of it,
anyway). I agree with Rosenstrach and Ward: The secret is letting the
kids put their own toppings on. Giving them agency makes them more
excited to eat the result. I also served a side of frozen edamame from
Whole Foods.

Total cost of meal: less than $6: $2.50 for 3
organic potatoes at our local farmstand, $3 worth of toppings, and
about 50 cents' worth of edamame.

PreparationCut
the tops off of the heads of garlic and discard. Drizzle each head of
garlic with 1 teaspoon of the olive oil, then sprinkle with a pinch of
salt. Wrap the garlic in parchment paper in one bundle and then wrap in
aluminum foil. Bake in a 400-degree oven for 45-50 minutes; the aroma
will tell you when it's ready. The flesh should be soft and golden
brown. Remove from the oven to cool.

Heat the remaining 2
tablespoons of olive oil in a skillet over medium heat. Add the onion
and a pinch of salt and sauté until translucent, about 4 minutes. Add
the minced garlic, potatoes, thyme, pepper, and 1/4 teaspoon of salt and
sauté for 5 minutes. Pour in 3/4 cup of the broth to deglaze the
skillet, stirring to loosen any bits stuck to the pan. Simmer until
potatoes are tender and the liquid has mostly evaporated. Remove from
heat.

When the garlic is cool enough to handle, squeeze the flesh into a bowl and mash with the back of a spoon to form a paste.

Pour
the remaining 2 1/2 cups of broth into the blender. Add the roasted
garlic and the onion-potato mixture and blend until smooth. Transfer to a
soup pot over low heat and stir in 1/4 teaspoon salt. Cook just until
heated through. You may want to add a spritz of lemon juice, a pinch of
salt, and a drizzle of chive oil.

Lucky for me, everyone--even
Don--loved the garlic soup, which cost $8.75 total to make. Don made a
big green salad ($2 worth of lettuce) with a variety of raw veggies
shaved or sliced on top (50 cents), and we toasted some homemade bread.

PreparationPreheat broiler to high. Place cast-iron skillet on the middle rack of the oven to preheat.Remove
the loose outer leaves of the sprouts and trim the stems. Cut sprouts
in half. In a large bowl, toss the sprouts with olive oil, salt, and
chile flakes. When the skillet begins smoking, add the sprouts and
broil, stirring once or twice, until charred and soft but not burnt,
about 10 to 12 minutes. The amount of time will depend on the sprouts
themselves, as they change throughout the season. Toss cooked sprouts in
a bowl with lemon juice, more olive oil, and a pinch of sea salt. Serve
immediately.

29 March 2013

We've both rallied for the final week of our challenge—planning meals ahead of time, shopping frugally, and cooking big dinners (= leftovers) so we can make it to Easter on this limited food stamp budget. That said, Don came home from work last night with organic sour cream ($3.29) and organic salsa ($4.29), two items that—while they certainly make a burrito more appealing—are hardly essential. We're low on staples like milk, eggs, apples, and bread and now we have only $13.39 for the next two days. Last night, as we were falling asleep, Don asked if we had enough money in the account to buy a loaf of bread. "I'll just make a loaf tomorrow," I yawned.

Maybe our newly frugal, homemaker ways will stick with us even after the challenge is over.

Even though we had a full weekend of gardening and other projects, I managed to get to the farmers' market on Saturday and process a bunch of veggies right away. I blanched the purple kale, roasted the cauliflower with some olive oil and cumin (so it would be easy to use on salads throughout the week), and rinsed the radishes, putting them in a tupperware container. The rest, I put in the crisper so it'd be ready to be cooked or eaten raw.

Sunday evening, Don made his leek tart, so we had that for dinner with some miner's lettuce salad (with radishes and candied pecans on top) and leftover tart for lunch the next day.

Leek tart. As you can see, I'm still working on the aesthetics of pie crust

Cover and cook until the leeks are very soft, with little color, stirring occasionally and reducing the heat as they cook, about 30 minutes. After about 15 minutes of cooking time, set a rack in the lowest position of the oven. Preheat the oven to 400º F.

Beat together until well combined:

2 large eggs

1/2 cup heavy cream, half-and-half, or light cream

1/4 teaspoon freshly grated or ground nutmeg

salt and black pepper to taste

Remove pastry shell from the fridge. (I usually make two pie crusts at a time, so we had one ball of dough in the freezer from a week or so ago.) When the leeks are done, add to the custard and transfer to the prepared pastry shell. Bake until golden and the custard is set, 20-30 minutes. Let rest for 10 minutes to settle, then cut into wedges and serve.

Leftover quiche for lunch on Monday, with a crazy salad (miner's lettuce topped with cauliflower, avocado, and candied pecans. Huh!)

Because we were short a few ingredients for soup on Monday evening, Don made veggie burritos for Madeleine and I. (I told you it was his fall-back meal!) He usually sautés some zucchini, carrots, onions, and corn for the filling (as well as beans & cheese), but I requested he sneak some of the purple kale into mine. Delicious! Later that evening I made a batch of dough for no-knead bread so we could have it with soup for dinner on Tuesday.

I had found a recipe for a simple (and inexpensive) cream of potato soup in MFK Fisher's book "How to Cook a Wolf" and was eager to try it. About how to survive wartime shortages with panache, this essential little book is full of tricks for making your food budget stretch—and more importantly, for getting pleasure out of what food you can afford. But the soup, which is basically a hot vichyssoise with milk used in place of chicken stock, was bland and underwhelming. Adding salt helped, but I won't reproduce the recipe here, since I think we can all do better. (To give her credit, Fisher seems skeptical of the soup's "freakish" appeal in the U.S. during the '40s.) My dear family—even Madeleine!—gamely ate the soup without complaint and oohed and ahhed over the fresh bread with butter. We had a little salad (miner's lettuce, radishes, and pecans again) on the side. I had splurged earlier in the week at the store, buying some organic Newman's Own sandwich cookies. So for dessert, I made "oreo" milkshakes for all of us, using the organic vanilla ice-cream we had in the freezer. (It must be said that Madeleine knew this dessert was coming. Otherwise, she most certainly would not have eaten the soup!)

Wednesday night, Don made a yummy veggie stir fry with cashew nuts, sesame oil, and noodles. There was enough left over for each of us to have a portion yesterday.

Last night, I was all set to make a white bean and butternut squash soup. I'd let the white beans soak all day so they were ready to cook. But when I called around to Whole Foods and Kruger's Market, I quickly realized that there was no organic squash to be found. It is, after all, officially spring. So I changed my plan. The beans would work perfectly with the kale—sautéed in olive oil and garlic, of course. I've often eaten that, with bread, as a full meal—but you can also put it over pasta (or for a surprising twist you'll never find in Mexico, in tacos!). But then I remembered the poor neglected Brussels sprouts I'd bought at the farmers' market on Saturday. I rifled through my recipe book and found this super easy recipe from one of my favorite Portland restaurants, Ned Ludd. Don't think I'm getting all fancy on you. This took less than 20 minutes to make (including cooking time) and the results are magical.

Some people can't stop eating chips. I gorge on charred Brussels sprouts.

Ned Ludd's Charred Bruss (from Chef Jason French)Makes 6 servings

1 pound Brussels sprouts

1 tablespoon olive oil, plus more for finishing

Pinch of coarse sea salt

1/2 teaspoon red chile flakes

Juice from 1/2 lemon

Preheat broiler to high. Place cast-iron skillet on the middle rack of the oven to preheat.

Remove the loose outer leaves of the brussels sprouts and trim the
stems. Cut sprouts in half. In a large bowl, toss the sprouts with olive
oil, salt and chile flakes. When the skillet begins smoking, add the
sprouts and broil, stirring once or twice, until charred and soft but
not burnt, about 10 to 12 minutes. The amount of time will depend on
the sprouts themselves, as they change throughout the season. Toss
cooked sprouts in a bowl with lemon juice, more olive oil and a pinch of
sea salt. Serve immediately.

So for dinner, I had leftover stir fry noodles (I heated it up in a pan with more garlic and a fried egg) and a big bowl of Brussels sprouts. (Don worked late and made two quesadillas when he got home.) I'll admit that I was craving a hamburger most of yesterday. I held out both because we're so low on money but also because I have a business lunch today (Friday) and a hamburger will certainly be on the menu. ;-)

I'll do one final post to let you know how our last two days go and to reflect on all we've learned during the past six weeks of our food stamp challenge.

24 March 2013

After my foray to the PSU farmers' market yesterday, we have $66.91 remaining in our grocery account to get us through the final week of our Food Stamp Challenge. I only spent $32 at the market, buying enough vegetables for the coming week—cauliflower, radishes, purple kale, leeks, potatoes, miner's lettuce and shiitake mushrooms—plus a dozen farm-fresh eggs ($6). Can we make it to Easter on $67? If we're careful, I think we can.

We've been far from perfect, but we've done our best to make up for our lapses. For instance, after our 3-day vacation in Seattle, we deducted $51 from our account. (Our budget is $526 per month so that works out to $17 a day for the month of March). Don and I have each had a few business lunches or dinners that fell outside our food stamp budget, but we've made up for the missed home-cooked meals by having friends and family over for dinner. Thursday we had Don's aunt Bridget over for pizza and salad. (Homemade pizza is a great budget meal, by the way, and typically we have plenty of leftovers for the next day's lunch.) Wednesday, we had our dear friend Julia over for a breakfast of veggie omelettes, toast, and blueberry-kale smoothies.

Pizza: Madeleine's favorite dinner

Don and I are both looking forward to this Challenge being over. Not because we've felt particularly deprived. In fact, we've been eating more organic food than we ordinarily do—and many of our meals have been downright inspired. However, there are certain ingredients, we're finding, that are sub-par—or entirely unavailable—when they're organic. We both miss queso fresco (which, at least in Oregon, doesn't come certified organic) and are looking forward to having a wider selection of cheese in general. (The organic mozzarella we bought for pizza earlier this week had an odd taste and texture to it.) Don complained that the organic flour tortillas he bought at Trader Joe's the other day were dry and stuck together, making them tear as he separated them. We each have a list of things we want to buy starting April 1st. For Don, it'll be root beer and Morningstar veggie sausages; Madeleine can't wait for the return of her favorite "chunky feta" salad dressing. As for me, I'm hankering for bagels (as far as I can tell, there are no organic bagels in Portland) and beer. (We've been sparing about buying organic beer over the last 5 weeks both because beer is a luxury when you're on a budget but also because you can't buy alcoholic beverages with foods stamps!)

When in doubt? Have a salad.

I'll leave you with an image of a satisfying lunch I made earlier this week—no recipe required. I had planned on having leftover mac and cheese with peas (we always keep bags of peas and corn in the freezer), but after rooting around in the fridge, realized Don had swiped it for his lunch. Instead, I roasted a sweet potato with some olive oil and garlic, made a big salad, and scattered some walnuts, the sweet potato pieces, and a handful of cannellini beans over the top. A piece of toast completed the meal. Total cost? $3, probably less.

14 March 2013

The organic food stamp challenge has been, well, a challenge lately. It's not that we've run out of money—yet. But because we went to Seattle for the weekend (a trip that was excluded from the challenge), we didn't have our usual two days of intensive food preparation. As a result, we have no granola, no bread, no waffles, no stock, and no black beans. On Monday morning, we woke to discover that we were not only out of eggs and milk, but honey, jam, and salad greens. Oh, right—we didn't go grocery shopping this weekend! Meals have been sorry affairs, cobbled together from leftovers in the fridge. On Monday, I grazed on apples, cheese, and leftover pasta (I was on a deadline so too busy to run to the store). For dinner, I roasted cauliflower (leftover from last week's cauliflower mac and cheese) with olive oil and garlic and heated up some already cooked salmon from last week. (Don worked late and ate leftovers at the office, I presume.) Tuesday night, because Safeway doesn't carry organic tortillas, I literally ate beans and rice. Some weeks, creating balanced home-cooked meals is harder than others.

But yesterday, I was inspired to do better after sitting in on a "Cooking Matters" class at the Oregon Food Bank. Part nutrition education and part hands-on cooking lessons, Cooking Matters is a 6-week-long class that teaches low-income folks how to cook healthy meals from scratch. The curriculum, which was developed by the the anti-hunger organization Share Our Strength, covers everything from knife safety to buying fruits and vegetables on a budget. Demand for the class, which is free, is high—in the Portland Metro area alone, the Oregon Food Bank runs about 50 classes a year. (In 2012, there were 73 classes in the state of Oregon.) Impressively, more than 30,000 people nationwide took either Cooking Matters classes or participated in a stand-alone "Store tour" last year. (Store tours teach people how to inspect labels, shop for whole grains, and calculate unit pricing.)

Once peeled, broccoli stems are great to eat

I wanted to observe a Cooking Matters class so I could better understand the challenges of living on food stamps (or any limited budget) while still getting healthy food on the table. As I've mentioned in previous posts, Don and I have an unfair advantage in that we both know our way around a kitchen, which makes sticking to a budget much easier. (We don't buy any processed foods except for the MorningStar vegetarian sausages Don likes so much—but he can't buy them until Lent is over because they're not organic.)

Merrill Maiano, the volunteer chef who teaches this particular class, started by announcing the menu: turkey meatloaf with quinoa and roasted veggies—broccoli, cauliflower, and butternut squash. (The mention of squash elicited an "ewww!" from one opinionated student.) Ignoring the outburst, Merrill explained that turkey, unlike beef or veal, is a lean source of protein and that quinoa is both healthier and more flavorful than rice. (Note: quinoa is actually a seed, not a grain. It comes from a plant that's related to spinach and chard and it contains all nine amino acids, making it one of the most protein-rich vegetarian foods on the planet.) One of the cool things about Cooking Matters is that at the end of each class, students are sent home with several ingredients from the day's meal—incentive to recreate it at home. This day, each student went home with turkey, onions, carrots, celery, and a baggie of quinoa.

The 12 students—a diverse group of women and men (one of whom was deaf)—trooped into the kitchen, washed their hands, and dove right in. This was their graduation class, so I shouldn't have been surprised to see such excellent knife skills in action: lots of deft chopping of garlic, onion, celery and carrots. Half the class made a mirepoixfor the meatloaf while the other half started chopping the veggies. Merrill showed us a trick for splitting open the squash. Using a small frying pan like a hammer, she hit the back of the chef's knife, wedging it deeper into the squash. (It's a safer technique than using your hand to push the blade, because the squash is so tough.)

Merrill uses a pan to wedge the knife deeper

As Merrill expertly peeled and chopped broccoli stems into bite-sized pieces (to roast with the florets), I asked her if she ever taught students how to make vegetable stock. (One frugal way to do this is to save peelings from veggies in the fridge or freezer until you have enough to make stock.)

"I've had people in this class who don't know the difference between broccoli and asparagus," she told me, by way of an answer. "And who have never baked before in their lives." The upshot: When you're starting with such a limited knowledge base, it's best to stick to the syllabus. (Though of course, if a student asks her how to make stock, Merrill will happily tell him how it's done.) Merrill reminded me of another hurdle many of her students face: insufficient equipment. One man in this class doesn't have an oven at home, only an electric skillet. You can't very well recreate carrot-pineapple muffins at home if you don't have an oven. At the beginning of the six weeks, though, many of Merrill's students are consuming a diet of mostly processed, packaged foods, but by the end they know how to make stir fry, bean soup, grain-based salads, meatloaf, and muffins. This is progress, indeed!

Back in the class, the students were sautéing the mirepoix on the stovetop, filling the kitchen with the lovely sweet scent of browning onions. Meanwhile, their classmates began preparing the turkey meatloaf, whisking a dressing of egg, Dijon, herbs, hot sauce, and parmesan cheese together with breadcrumbs.

Heat oven to 350 degrees. Line the baking dish with foil and lightly grease it with cooking spray.

Heat the oil in a large sauté pan or skillet over medium heat. Add the onion, carrot and celery and cook until the onions soften and begin to become translucent.

Add the garlic and sauté for 30 seconds, until fragrant. Transfer the entire mixture to a bowl to cool.

In another large bowl, whisk the egg, water, herbs, Dijon, Worcestershire sauce, hot sauce, salt, and pepper, and parmesan cheese together until completely combined.

Whisk in the breadcrumbs until just evenly distributed. Then, stir in the cooled onion mixture.

Add the ground turkey and cooked grains until the mixture is uniform.

Press the meat into a ball and transfer it to the baking dish. Once in the dish, shape the meat into a rectangular 2-inch thick loaf. There should be about an inch or so of space between the loaf and the sides of your baking dish. Spray the loaf lightly with cooking spray or brush with a little oil.

Bake the loaf for approximately 45 minutes, or until the center of the loaf reads 160 degrees on a meat thermometer. If you don’t have a thermometer, cut into the loaf to confirm that it is opaque and no longer pink in the middle.

When the loaf is done, remove it from the oven and let it rest for 10-15 minutes before serving. Slice into 1-inch thick pieces and serve.

As the meatloaf cooked and the veggies roasted, I chatted with a few students about their favorite parts of the class. One man told me he made a garbanzo bean soup at home and his cousin and her son, who had never tasted garbanzo beans before, weren't quite sure what to make of them. "It was something new," he said, which was "pretty cool." A blonde woman in her '50s said she loved discovering new foods in this class—like pea pods (in a veggie stir fry) and the carrot-pineapple muffins, which were also a hit at home. Yet another woman said this class has taught her a lot about "seasoning, how to cut things, what to put in your pantry, and how to improvise without a recipe."

Turkey quinoa meatloaf & roasted vegetables—yum!

At last, it was time to eat. I was invited to stay and taste the fruits of their labors, which I gladly did. As we helped ourselves to the food, one student was applauded for making vegetables half of his plate, following the USDA's "MyPlate" guidelines. (I got the sense that six weeks ago, he was eating more meat than veggies.) The meatloaf was moist and flavorful--with a nice crunch and nuttiness because of the quinoa. The vegetables, which had been tossed with olive oil and some spices and roasted in the oven for about 20 minutes, were a little caramelized and simply delicious.

Before I left, I asked assistant chef Stacy Flaherty whether the issue of organic produce ever arises. It turns out it does. "The people we get in these classes—they know organic food is out there and they know it can be expensive," Flaherty says. Though the instructors are careful not to tell students what they should or shouldn't buy, they may mention which fruits and vegetables are safer to eat conventionally. (Those with thicker skins or rinds like avocado, watermelon, or grapefruit.)

Erin Carver, the Americorps Member who works in the Food Bank's nutrition education program, reminded students that farmers' markets will be opening soon, and that all of the Portland Farmers Markets accept food stamps. A few of these, she noted, even have matching programs—free money, in effect, for you to spend on fresh fruits & vegetables.

More soon on "Beyond Organic" foods and how we weather the final two weeks of the Food Stamp Challenge.

28 February 2013

This week I've made a concerted effort to plan meals around the veggies I got at the farmers' market on Saturday. On Monday, I made a heaping bowl of coleslaw using only half of the purple cabbage and half a red onion. Red cabbage, which I tend to overlook, is a cruciferous vegetable that's rich in Vitamin A and Vitamin C. It also contains two powerful antioxidants—lycopene and anthocyanins—that are known to help prevent heart disease and prostate cancer. Nice.

Coleslaw (the rest is already in the fridge)

The recipe, which couldn't be any easier, yielded enough coleslaw for lunch all week.

1/2 cabbage [$2]

1/2 a red onion [75¢]

olive oil [about 50¢]

red wine vinegar [about 25¢ worth]

Total: $3.50

Tear off and discard the tough outer layers of 1 small cabbage. (Or 1/2 a huge cabbage.) Cut into quarters and remove the core. Turn cut side down and slice crosswise into thin shreds. Mix together in a large bowl with:

1/2 small red onion, sliced as thin as possible

salt

Prepare a vinaigrette by mixing together 1 tablespoon cider or wine vinegar, salt, and black pepper.

Stir to dissolve the salt and then whisk in: 4 tablespoons olive oil

Taste for acid and salt and adjust as desired. Pour the dressing over the cabbage and onions and mix well. Taste again. Eat right away or let it sit for a while to let the flavors permeate and the cabbage soften.

Tuesday night I made a tasty one-pot supper of whole wheat rotini with broccoli, grated parmesan, and olive oil. Following Tamar Adler's sensible advice in An Everlasting Meal, I used the same pot of salted water to cook the broccoli and the pasta.

Boil the broccoli for about 5 min., tasting to see if it's done. "Vegetables are done when a sharp knife easily pierces a piece of one," writes Ms. Adler. Remove with a slotted spoon directly to a big bowl and drizzle with olive oil. Then, bring water back to a boil and adjust seasoning. (If it's too salty, add more water.) Add the pasta. While the pasta is cooking, smash the broccoli a little with a wooden spoon and grate the Parmesan directly into the bowl. When the pasta is done, save a glass of the salty water. Drain pasta, add to bowl w/ vegetable and cheese along with a little of the pasta water and mix. I added more olive oil and sprinkled with salt.

Finally, last night, we didn't have time to make a leek tart from scratch (that's a weekend project) so Don whipped up some vegetarian burritos. (Notice a theme? We each have our fall-back meals. Mine tends to be pasta-based, Don's tend to be Mexican.) Not wanting to miss a chance to eat our farmers' market bounty, I cut up some of the kale, blanched it, and then sauteed it in olive oil, tucking some leaves into my burritos. (Don prefers his kale on the side.) The burritos were filled with black beans, corn, sauteed onion and green pepper, and some chipotle salsa. I topped mine with avocado.

A note about sources for organic food. We received the New Seasons Market flyer in our Oregonian newspaper yesterday and I was struck once again by how fortunate we are to live within biking distance of this reasonably-priced chain, which prioritizes organic food. The deals are remarkable. For example, the specials this week are:

organic fuji apples: $1.49 a pound

organic broccoli (yes, we need more): $1.49 a pound

organic large Hass avocadoes 2 for $3

organic whole wheat sandwich bread (freshly baked) 2 for $5

organic bulk coffee, $9.99 a pound

Cascadian Farm organic frozen vegetables, 2 for $4

I'm well aware that not every city has such deals on organic food. New Seasons is one of the reasons this organic food stamp challenge hasn't felt like all that much of a challenge yet. Today is the last day of the month and we have $56 left of our pro-rated food stamp amount in our grocery account. I'm amazed that we still have any money left (especially considering we bought local Dungeness crab last week to make crab cakes for my mom and her husband) but I think that's because we haven't had to buy staples like organic flour, organic almond butter, or organic cheese yet. We re-up our account tomorrow with $526 for the whole of March.

Now that we're only buying organic ingredients, though, we're starting to frequent Trader Joe's and Safeway a lot more, too. Organic condiments (more so than produce, I find) tend to cost a lot more than conventional condiments, but TJ's has excellent prices on both organic maple syrup ($8 for 12 oz.) and organic olive oil ($6 for 16.9 oz.). (I know olive oil isn't a condiment, but it's also usually way more expensive than its conventional counterpart.) Safeway has an affordably-priced "Organics" brand; I like their whole wheat pasta, for example, which was on sale the other day for $1.59 (for a 1 lb box). But Don, an apple juice connoisseur, was aggrieved when I returned home with the Organics apple-juice, which he says is sub-par because it's made from concentrate and too heavily filtered. (Not to mention it's in plastic, not glass.)

Stay tuned for my next post, in which I'll show how the Oregon Food Bank is teaching low-income folks how to shop for and cook healthy meals.

24 February 2013

Yesterday morning, I took the bus downtown to shop at the winter farmers' market. Because we're sticking to a food stamp budget, I brought only $25 in cash. If you limit yourself to produce, this can actually go pretty far. (Smoked salmon, locally-made cheese, and chorizo were all outside our budget).

I must confess, though, that I made my first (intentional) flub at the market. I had $2.50 and change left and was wondering if that'd be enough for a bunch of organic carrots when I smelled the Tastebud bakery cart. (Rule #1: don't go to the farmers' market with an empty stomach.) I went over and peered at their Montreal-style bagels, noting the price ($1.25) each. I suspected they weren't organic but we both love bagels and how odd that I should have exact change!

Anyway, Don had violated our all-organic rule earlier in the week when he bought a donut at Safeway (he justified it because he needed to get cash back to pay for his shoe repair), so with that in mind I went up to the counter and ordered two bagels. After I paid I asked if they used organic flour. "No, but we get our flour from a local cooperative called Shepherd's Grain," the lady said. (Shepherd's Grain farmers practice no-till agriculture, which reduces soil erosion, and crop rotation, which reduces pests and disease—but they're not certified organic. Organic wheat, though it is available, is so much more expensive than conventionally-farmed wheat, that many bakers choose not to use it because they'd have to raise their prices quite a bit.)

When I got home and announced that I'd gotten bagels for lunch, Don's immediate response was not "thank-you sweetie, what a treat!" but "Are they organic?" Some squabbling ensued about why he felt it was OK to eat a non-organic donut (he was eating it on the fly and used his own money, not our grocery account) but yet frowned upon my buying two non-organic bagels and bringing them home to consume. Ultimately, we decided that we'd both messed up and that we should try harder to avoid non-organic food items.

For lunch, I sheepishly ate the non-organic bagel, toasted, with butter and some scrambled eggs on top. I also made a simple watercress salad, topped with parmesan and candied pecans. Don, grumbling, ate the poppy-seed bagel with some cream cheese he found in the fridge and a few bits of smoked salmon leftover from a previous meal.

Don's brother and his boyfriend are visiting us this weekend, so this morning, Don made organic multi-grain waffles (served with maple syrup, honey, or jam) for us and their two friends. Typically we have leftover waffles, which we freeze in a tupperware container and defrost for breakfasts throughout the week. But this time, with six adults total, we easily ate them all. (We stepped outside the food stamp budget last night to celebrate a friend's birthday at a restaurant, so to make up for that meal not eaten at home we figure it's only fair that we make brunch for four guests.)

Today's lunch, which we ate around 3:00, was a big salad for me (made of romaine lettuce leftover from Thursday night's dinner plus some watercress, chopped cucumbers, shredded carrots, avocado slices, and more candied pecans) plus a piece of whole wheat toast, and (for Don) a cheese sandwich on a leftover Dave's Killer Bread hamburger bun.

Pour the buttermilk and egg mixture into the dry ingredients and stir until just mixed

Pour in: 8 tablespoons butter, melted

and
stir until well mixed. If necessary, thin with more buttermilk: the
batter should pour off the spoon. Cook in a preheated waffle iron until
crisp and golden.

* While not certified organic, these apples, from a small family-farm in Hood River, Oregon are no-spray. Like many small farms, this family farms organically but opts out of organic certification because it's costly and time-consuming. As a result, the apples are less expensive than certified organic apples. (More on this subject, I hope, in a later post.)

22 February 2013

Looking back at the first week-and-a-half of our organic food stamp challenge, three meals stand out in my mind. The first, the most universally popular, was also the easiest and the cheapest. (Let that be a lesson to us all.) No, not rice and beans. A baked potato bar! I got the idea from Jenny Rosenstrach and Andy Ward, who write a family recipe column for Bon Appetit magazine.

Here's the non-recipe recipe:

Baked Potato Bar

1 russet potato for each person

Toppings: grated cheddar cheese, sour cream, one onion (which you caramelize slowly on the stovetop), black beans, anything else you have in your fridge that might be good on a potato. (I am a veggie freak so I usually add cooked broccoli, sautéed spinach, or some other leafy green, but we didn't have any of these in the fridge this time.)

In a 450-degree oven, bake the potatoes, placing them directly on the oven rack. (No need to wrap them in foil.) Let bake for 50 minutes or until tender. Meanwhile, if you really want a cheap treat, cut one onion (any kind) into thin slices and cook slowly in about 1/4 cup olive oil in a large skillet over low heat. (Add some salt & pepper, too.) Stir occassionally so onions don't burn. It'll take 20-30 minutes, but the results are astonishing: a sweet, golden brown delicious goopy mass of onion.

When the potatoes are done, slice each one horizontally and butter both halves. Serve with toppings.

The results surpised me. Don kept saying, "this is so delicious!" and even picky eater Madeleine "mmmed" and ate most of her potato. (I agree with Rosenstrach and Ward: The secret is letting the kids put their own toppings on. Giving them agency makes them more excited to eat the result.) Because of our lack of green vegetables, I also served a side of edamame. (Frozen edamame, which we buy at Whole Foods, has become my secret vegetable weapon. Like most kids, Madeleine loves it.)

The cost for this meal was less than $6. ($2.50 for 3 organic potatoes at our local farmstand; $3 worth of toppings and about 50¢ worth of edamame).

Another winner was Saturday night's repast, which we shared with my dad and his wife. In the afternoon, I hunkered down and made Mark Bittman's 1-hour veggie broth (which costs about $4 to make organically) in preparation for a roasted garlic soup. Knowing that Don isn't as fond of garlic as I am, I hid from him what kind of soup I was making until the last possible moment. (But I also knew that roasting garlic mellows the flavor, making it sweeter and nuttier than raw garlic. I hoped to change his perception of garlic.)

vegetarian broth costs about $4 to make

The recipe for Vampire Slayer's Soup, from Rebecca Katz's excellent new cookbook, The Longevity Kitchen, is quite simple.

Prep time: 20 min.; Cook time: 1 hour

Ingredients

4 heads garlic ($3.83)

2 tablespoons + 4 teaspoons extra-virgin olive oil (about 20 cents)

1 cup diced yellow onion ($1.10)

2 teaspoons minced garlic (included in above price)

1 cup peeled and finely diced Yukon gold potatoes ($1.62)

1 teaspoon minced fresh thyme (we went without this)

1/3 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

3 1/4 cups veggie broth (roughly $2 worth of broth)

Cut the tops off of the heads of garlic and discard. Drizzle each head of garlic with 1 teaspoon of the olive oil, then sprinkle with a pinch of salt. Wrap the garlic in parchment paper in one bundle and then wrap in aluminum foil. Bake for 45-50 minutes; the aroma will tell you when it's ready. The flesh should be soft and golden brown. Remove from the oven to cool.

Heat the remaining 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a skillet over medium heat. Add the onion and a pinch of salt and sauté until translucent, about 4 minutes. Add the minced garlic, potatoes, thyme, pepper, and 1/4 teaspoon of salt and sauté for 5 minutes. Pour in 3/4 cup of the broth to deglaze the skillet, stirring to loosen any bits stuck to the pan. Simmer until potoates are tender and the liquid has mostly evaporated. Remove from heat.

When the garlic is cool enough to handle, squeeze the flesh into a bowl and mash with the back of a spoon to form a paste.

Pour the remaining 2 1/2 cups of broth into the blender. Add the roasted garlic and the onion-potato mixture and blend until smooth. Transfer to a soup pot over low heat and stir in 1/4 teaspoon salt. Cook just until heated through. You may want to add a spritz of lemon juice and a pinch of salt. Serve garnished with chive oil. [Note: I skipped the chive oil.]

Lucky for me, everyone—even Don—loved the garlic soup, which cost $8.75 total to make. Don made a big green salad ($2 worth of lettuce) with a variety of raw veggies shaved or sliced on top (50¢), and we toasted some homemade bread (recipe coming next week). Total cost of meal: less than $12

But my favorite dinner of the week was Don's ultra-frugal Sunday evening meal. He had been puttering around in the kitchen all afternoon—making a week's supply of granola and more vegetable broth—but it wasn't until right before dinner that I realized he was also making a Syrian lentil soup and brown rice pilaf. Both were perfectly spiced, super tasty, and nourishing. (Note to parents: 8-year-old Madeleine pronounced both disgusting. We're working on her table manners.) It's our practice to never force her to eat food she doesn't like, but she does have to try it.

1. Place lentils in a pan with stock or water, add one of the onions and the carrot and bring to a boil. Then turn down heat and let the soup simmer for 20-30 minutes until lentils are very soft.

2. Transfer the mixture to a blender or push it through a sieve or you can simply beat it well in the saucepan with a wooden spoon

3. Return the soup to the heat and add the cumin and lemon juice for seasoning.

4. Let it simmer for 10 minutes. Meanwhile, heat the oil and fry the remaining onion until it's translucent. Add the garlic and cook this until both ingredients turn golden brown.

5. Serve the soup in bowls garnished with the onion and garlic and with lemon wedges for extra zest.

[I haven't calculated the cost of this meal yet, but suffice it to say it was cheap. Organic lentils are $2.19 a pound, bulk, at our local grocery store.]

Four things this organic food stamp challenge has taught me so far.

1.) You simply have to plan, shop, and cook a lot on the weekend. Most people rarely have time on weeknights to cook vegetable stock and soup (not to mention homemade bread, which often requires overnight fermentation).

2.) I'm lucky to have a partner who likes to shop and cook as much as I do. Planning, shopping for, and cooking healthy meals would be much harder if I were a single mom. (Or even a single person without kids.)

3.) It's much easier to cook at home if you live near grocery stores. We don't have a car, but we're within walking or biking distance of a Safeway, a farmstand, and two other grocery stores (Fred Meyer and New Seasons Market, a Portland chain that focuses on locally grown and organic food and that's a whole lot cheaper than Whole Foods). In other words, we live in the opposite of a food desert.

4.) Leftovers, leftovers, leftovers! We both make a habit of turning last night's leftovers into today's lunch. What if there are no leftovers? That'll be the subject of a future post.

20 February 2013

Every year, my partner Don and I give up something for Lent, even though neither of us is particularly religious. Two years ago, it was plastic. (Try grocery shopping without buying anything shrouded in the stuff—it's not easy.) This year, I floated an unorthodox idea. Why don't we take the Food Stamp Challenge, only we'll limit ourselves to organic ingredients?

I'll admit that I came up with this challenge in part because I'm annoyed by the common perception that organic food is somehow "elitist." Most recently, this meme was perpetuated by New York Times
contributor Roger Cohen. (If you really want to know what I think of his line of thought, see here.)

The notion that only well-heeled Whole Foods shoppers care about organic food is misguided. As I've written about food justice organizations and urban farming projects over the past few years, I've met plenty of low-income people who go out of their way to find food that hasn't been doused in pesticides. (What's really elitist is the assumption that they wouldn't want healthy food, too.) Many low-income people find ways to afford it—be it growing veggies in a backyard garden, combing through items at the food bank, shopping at
Walmart, or using food stamps at farmers' markets. If you don't believe me, hear this: SNAP sales at farmers' markets increased 42% from 2011 to 2012. (In total, SNAP recipients spent $16,598,255 at farmers' markets in 2012.)

Hundreds of Clevelanders rely on this community garden for food

That's not to say that organic food is cheap. In fact, as you probably know, it's typically more expensive than conventionally grown/raised food—especially when it comes to meat and dairy. (Though that's changing as demand for organic food increases and economies of scale reduce the cost of production.) So I was really curious: Could my family of three survive on a food stamp budget buying nothing but organic food?

When I moved to Oregon three years ago, I was living alone and making so little as a freelance writer that I qualified for the maximum food stamp allotment: $200 a month. Currently, the maximum allowance for
SNAP benefits (the technical term for food stamps) in Oregon for a
family of three is $526. That's $131.50 a week for groceries. That
doesn't sound too bad until you break it down per meal: $6.25
total, or $2 per person. (Though most people who do the SNAP challenge limit themselves to the average food stamp benefit in their state, we chose to limit ourselves to the maximum allotment. I'll explain why in a later post.)

Don and I are both frugal by nature—and we both know how to cook—but I worry: Does this mean six weeks of organic rice and beans?

Here are our ground rules:

• Because we abhor waste, we're allowing ourselves to use up whatever was already in our cupboard (or fridge) before this Challenge began—whether it's organic or not. Fortunately, we typically buy 95% organic food anyway. But this does give us an unfair advantage—we already have olive oil, spices, sour cream, almond butter, and random hunks of cheese. We also have some basic staples like flour, lentils, and rice. That said, we're doing this Challenge for six weeks, so we'll need to replace most if not all of these with our lower budget.

• We will always buy USDA certified organic unless the food meets our conditions for "beyond organic." For example, the raw milk we buy from a dairy down in Champoeg is not certified organic because our dairy farmer has only three cows and it wouldn't be worth it for her to go through the organic certification process. However, we've visited the farm on several occasions and know "our" cows graze on organic pasture nine months out of the year, rotating to fresh pasture every 24 hours. (They get organic hay in the winter.)

• Friends and family are welcome to take us out to dinner (or have us over for a meal)—as this might happen in real life—but if they expect us to pay our share at a restaurant, we'll tell them about our Food Stamp Challenge and invite them over for dinner at our house instead. While this may stretch our budget, it'd still be much cheaper than a night out at a Portland restaurant.

• We don't have a garden (yet) so we won't be supplementing our shopping with free veggies. Also, since we're not actually receiving SNAP benefits, we won't be eligible for the matching programs at local farmers' markets that I used three years ago. (Portland's program, which gives you $7 extra to spend for every $7 of SNAP benefits you spend at the farmers' market, has been so popular that they've had to reduce the matching amount from $10 to $7.)

organic beer will be too expensive for us

Can we do it? The jury is out. Don thinks it'll be fairly easy since we don't buy much processed food anyway and we're mostly vegetarian. But I have a feeling that we're going to have to sacrifice quite a bit—even considering we have some basic staples and spices already in the pantry. (We can say goodbye to beer, for instance, and we may have to cut back on organic condiments, which are astronomically priced in my opinion.) In the coming weeks, I'll share our struggles, favorite recipes, and shopping secrets.

30 January 2013

New York Times columnist Roger Cohen says that organic food is elitist and assumes that the only people who demand healthy, pesticide-free food are well-off Whole Foods shoppers. I don't know how else to say this: he's wrong.

Times columnist Roger Cohen says that organic food is elitist, and assumes that the only people who demand healthy, pesticide-free food are well-off Whole Foods shoppers. Well, I don’t know how else to put it: he’s wrong. - See more at: http://civileats.com/2013/01/30/eradicating-food-deserts-one-congregation-at-a-time/#sthash.eHS6ryhr

Times columnist Roger Cohen says that organic food is elitist, and assumes that the only people who demand healthy, pesticide-free food are well-off Whole Foods shoppers. Well, I don’t know how else to put it: he’s wrong. - See more at: http://civileats.com/2013/01/30/eradicating-food-deserts-one-congregation-at-a-time/#sthash.eHS6ryhr.blog on why Roger Cohen gets it wrong. How Ecumenical Ministres of Oregon makes sure that organic food is anything but elitist, for Civil Eats.

25 September 2012

Responses to the recent Stanford University organic
study have been all over the map. Some commentators, such
as Marion Nestle, wrote that the study—which concludes that organic food is
no more nutritious than its conventional counterparts—misses the point. No one
buys organic food because they think it’s more nutritious. They buy it for what
it doesn’t contain: pesticides. Others, such as Tom
Philpott of Mother Jones, argued
that the study underplays the health risks of even small amounts of organophosphate
pesticidees.

But most news reports let the study stand unchallenged. And Roger
Cohen, a columnist at the International Herald
Tribune, went a step further, gleefully celebrating the researchers’
findings because they confirmed his long-held view that organic food is a scam,
a fad, a fable—“an elitist, pseudoscientific indulgence shot through with
hype.”

Mr. Cohen may not be aware of the minefield he walked into
by using the term “elitist.” After all, his beat is usually Middle East
politics, not the U.S.’s sustainable food movement. The “elitist” slur has been
lobbed at the food movement with such ferocity and regularity that it’s become
a bit of a joke among movement activists. Are school gardens (most of which are
organically farmed) elitist? Are the low-income folks in West Oakland who buy
organic produce at sliding-scale farm stands elitist? Are the homeless people
in my hometown of Portland, Oregon who get healthy, organic meals at Sisters of
the Road, P:ear, or Outside In elitist?

Joking aside, the “elitist” tag is
misguided because it perpetuates the notion that only upper-middle class people
care about healthy, fresh, “organic” produce—and that’s patently not the case. As
I’ve reported on the food justice movement over the past three years, I’ve met struggling
people all over this country who love pesticide-free fresh fruits and vegetables
and who find ways to get them on their plates—whether it’s via using food
stamps at farmers’ markets, spotting deals at Walmart, or getting a plot at a
community garden. Since when has it been “elitist” to not want poison on your
food?

Little does Mr. Cohen know, but all across the country,
small-scale projects are sprouting up that make it easier and more affordable
for low-income populations to access fresh, affordable and yes, even organic
produce. In West Oakland—a food desert—volunteers at City Slicker Farms have
planted over 200 gardens in residents’ backyards. They may not be
USDA-certified organic, but they are all grown without fertilizers and
pesticides. (What I’ve taken to calling lower-case “o” organic.) This is also
true of the crops grown at Cleveland’s 6-acre Ohio City Farm, which is adjacent
to a low-income housing authority, and has a reasonably-priced farmers’ market
that also accepts food stamps and WIC coupons. East New York Farms in
Brownsville, Brooklyn, runs two community farmers’ markets where organic
produce costs half as much as the produce sold at Union Square Greenmarket.
There are similar initiatives in Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia,
L.A., Milwaukee, and on and on.

Savvy shoppers know that when you buy organic produce at the
farmers’ market, you save a bundle. One
study found that organic produce is nearly 40 percent cheaper at farmers’
markets than it is at supermarkets. (Potatoes were the only exception.) And unbeknownst
to Cohen, nearly 3000 farmers’ markets and farm stands around the country accept
food stamps. Organizations like Michel Nischan’s Wholesome Wave sweeten the
deal by running “double value coupon programs” that match up to $20 that is
spent in food stamps at participating farmers’ markets. Over 300 farmers’
markets around the country participate in this Double Value Coupon Program,
which has dramatically increased the number of food stamp shoppers at farmers
markets. Though not all the produce at farmers’ markets is USDA-certified
Organic, most of it is grown without pesticides and using environmentally
sensitive techniques like integrated pest management.

So when people like Mr. Cohen think
that organic is synonymous with Whole Foods, I cringe. What about farmers’
markets and backyard gardens? What about Walmart, the largest seller of organic
produce in the country? The assumption that Whole Foods is the only place to
find organic food is in itself elitist. If Mr. Cohen spent any time in
low-income neighborhoods (where not only are there no Whole Foods, there
sometimes aren’t any grocery stores at all) he’d know that people of lower
economic classes source their organic produce elsewhere.

Finally, many of us buy organic
because we care about farmworker safety. While we’re all arguing about whether
pesticide residue from conventional produce harms us eaters or not (and Cohen
clearly thinks it does not), there is no doubt that the workers who toil in
pesticide-laden fields get very sick indeed.
(A recent
study at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Public Health
found that even prenatal exposure to pesticides can have negative consequences.)
Caring for others—how very elitist.

As for Cohen’s assertion that organic produce will never
“feed the world,” I’ll defer to food justice guru and esteemed author Raj
Patel. In his Room
for Debate post, he pointed out that despite conventional agriculture’s
current reliance on pesticides, we’re a long way off from feeding the world. One
billion people are still malnourished despite the supposed high yields of GMO
crops, and crops blanketed with chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Patel is hopeful, though, and his hope lies
with certain kinds of organic agriculture, which studies show can outperform
conventional ag. (With lower input costs and a smaller carbon footprint to
boot.) “Far from being a ‘luxury for the rich,’” Patel writes, “organic farming
may turn out to be a necessity not just for the poor, but for everyone.”

19 December 2011

When he was seven years old, Malik Yakini, inspired by his grandfather, planted his own backyard garden in Detroit, seeding it with carrots and other vegetables. Should it come as any surprise that today, Yakini has made urban farming his vocation? The Executive director of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network (DBCFSN), which he co-founded in 2006, he is also chair of the Detroit Food Policy Council, which advocates for a sustainable, localized food system and a food-secure Detroit.

It’s well known that Detroit has been hard hit by the economic crisis—its unemployment rate is a staggering 28%—but it also has one of the most well-developed urban agriculture scenes in the country. Over the past decade, resourceful Detroiters and organizations such as DBCFSN have been converting the city’s vacant lots and fallow land into lush farms and community gardens. According to the Greening of Detroit, there are now over 1,351 gardens in the city.

I spoke to Yakini, one of the leaders of Detroit’s vibrant food justice movement, about the problem with the term “food desert,” how Detroit vegans survive the winter, and what the DBCFSN is doing to change the food landscape in Detroit. “We’re really making an effort to reach beyond the foodies—to get to the common folk who are not really involved in food system reform,” says Yakini. Continue reading my interview on Civil Eats.

26 October 2011

When you hear the words Slow Food, do you conjure up a multi-course locavore dinner with wine pairings? If so, think again. Over the past three years, Slow Food USA president Josh Viertel has hammered home the mission of Slow Food: it's about advocating for food that is good (healthy), clean (i.e. no pesticides), and fair (farmers and workers get paid a living wage). As Viertel makes it clear in this interview I did with him for Civil Eats, Slow Food is at heart a social justice organization that's rallying members to be politically engaged, whether that's by taking up the $5 challenge or pressuring Congress for changes to the 2012 Food and Farm Bill. Taking pleasure in food—and in cooking—will always be inextricably linked to the organization's larger goal of ensuring that, "Everyone can eat food that is good for them, good for the environment and good for the people who grow and pick it." For inspiration, here's a video of a group of farmers who took the $5 challenge.

When Josh Viertel took the helm at Slow Food USA in 2008, the organization had a reputation—at least in this country—as a club for foodies. Under Viertel’s leadership, though, the organization has dispelled this image with an increasing focus on food justice issues such as improving the abysmal quality of cafeteria food and fighting “ag-gag” bills that would’ve made it illegal to take photos or videos of farms. Last month, Slow Food organized its members to “take back the happy meal” by showing that it’s possible to cook a nutritious meal for less than $5 a person. Over 30,000 people came together at over 5,500 events to participate in Slow Food’s $5 challenge.

When I spoke to Viertel a few weeks ago, he had just returned from a board meeting in Portland, Oregon, and was full of praise for both Andy Ricker’s Thai restaurant Pok-Pok and Portland’s energetic food justice scene. As I talked to him, I came to the happy realization that Slow Food is a flourishing network of people from all backgrounds and socioeconomic levels—from advocates of Native American fishing methods to radical kimchee makers in Indianapolis. All these members are coming together to overthrow the industrial food system and buy and make food that is good, clean, and fair.

- See more at: http://civileats.com/2011/10/26/on-food-justice-an-interview-with-slow-foods-josh-viertel/#sthash.dxbwA5Oo.dpuf

When Josh Viertel took the helm at Slow Food USA in 2008, the organization had a reputation—at least in this country—as a club for foodies. Under Viertel’s leadership, though, the organization has dispelled this image with an increasing focus on food justice issues such as improving the abysmal quality of cafeteria food and fighting “ag-gag” bills that would’ve made it illegal to take photos or videos of farms. Last month, Slow Food organized its members to “take back the happy meal” by showing that it’s possible to cook a nutritious meal for less than $5 a person. Over 30,000 people came together at over 5,500 events to participate in Slow Food’s $5 challenge.

When I spoke to Viertel a few weeks ago, he had just returned from a board meeting in Portland, Oregon, and was full of praise for both Andy Ricker’s Thai restaurant Pok-Pok and Portland’s energetic food justice scene. As I talked to him, I came to the happy realization that Slow Food is a flourishing network of people from all backgrounds and socioeconomic levels—from advocates of Native American fishing methods to radical kimchee makers in Indianapolis. All these members are coming together to overthrow the industrial food system and buy and make food that is good, clean, and fair.

- See more at: http://civileats.com/2011/10/26/on-food-justice-an-interview-with-slow-foods-josh-viertel/#sthash.dxbwA5Oo.dpuf

18 October 2011

When you hear the words Slow Food, do you conjure up a multi-course locavore dinner with wine pairings? If so, think again. Over the past three years, Slow Food USA president Josh Viertel has hammered home the mission of Slow Food: it's about advocating for food that is good (healthy), clean (i.e. no pesticides), and fair (farmers and workers get paid a living wage). As Viertel makes it clear in this interview I did with him for my column at the Faster Times last week, Slow Food is at heart a social justice organization that's rallying members to be politically engaged, whether that's by taking up the $5 challenge or pressuring Congress for changes to the 2012 Food and Farm Bill. Taking pleasure in food—and in cooking—will always be inextricably linked to the organization's larger goal of ensuring that, "Everyone can eat food that is good for them, good for the environment and good for the people who grow and pick it." For inspiration, here's a video of a group of farmers who took the $5 challenge.

The surprise darling of the Community Food Security Coalition conference last May was a little-known city councilman from Cleveland. He spoke fervently about his city, a city of flourishing community gardens, backyard bee hives and chicken coops, a city where all farmers’ markets accept food stamps, where schools get discounts for sourcing local food, and where both trans-fats and smoking on playgrounds are banned. His name? Joe Cimperman. A 4th term Democratic city councilman whose parents hail from Slovenia, Cimperman is a vocal advocate of community gardens, which create community and self-sufficiency. He told of coming together with community leaders, public health officials, doctors, and foundations to pass the Healthy Cleveland Initiative—a series of audacious policy goals that will improve the health of Clevelanders for years to come. (That is, if Ohio’s Republican-majority legislature doesn’t pre-emptively squash them.) He ended with this rallying cry: “Why are we in food policy? Because we want our friends to live longer!”

21 June 2011

In every social justice movement, there’s a tension between the grassroots advocates who want immediate solutions, and elected officials, who inevitably compromise the movement’s ideals. The food justice movement is no different. But 31-year old Debra Eschmeyer has spent her career proving that you can (and must) marry idealism to political pragmatism. After growing up on a dairy farm in Ohio, Eschmeyer went to work on agriculture policy issues at the National Family Farm Coalition in D.C. Later, she was the spokesperson for the National Farm to School Network, which gets food from local farms into school cafeterias. At the same time, she served as a Kellogg Food & Society Fellow, a prestigious two-year fellowship that supports leaders who are working to create a healthier food system. As a Kellogg Fellow, Eschmeyer and several of her colleagues—including Curt Ellis (producer and director of King Corn) and Cecily Upton (a former staffer at Slow Food USA)—began cooking up an exciting new project: a national service organization that teaches public school students about food and nutrition...

11 March 2011

Every Saturday on a sleepy side street in the industrial neighborhood
of West Oakland you’ll see an unlikely site: a farm stand bursting with
fresh, organic produce. Cabbage, collards, lettuce, spinach, carrots,
beets, and cilantro spill out of oversized tin buckets; fresh eggs—from
the hens who live not three yards away—are
tucked in cartons, ready for sale. At first glance, this looks like your
typical farmers’ market stand. Yet, look closer and you’ll see a bright
yellow sign describing the farm’s unique sliding scale. If your
unemployment check hasn’t come or “for whatever reason, cash is not
flowing in” you should help yourself to veggies, no explanation needed.
If you’re “Just Getting By”—money is tight and if it weren’t for this
affordable farm stand you’d be searching for deals at Safeway—then you
can pay the lower tier price. (A head of lettuce is $1.25; a bunch of
carrots, .75 cents.) If you can afford to shop at Whole Foods or the
Berkeley Farmers’ Market, you’re a “Sugar Mama” or “Sugar Daddy” and
should pay the higher price. (Higher in this case is still reasonable:
that same head of lettuce is $2; carrots are $1.) Eggs are priced at
$2, $4, and $6 a dozen.

City Slicker Farms was founded ten years ago by Willow Rosenthal when she moved to West Oakland and discovered a dearth of fresh food. Residents without cars
had no choice but to buy their groceries at corner stores or liquor
stores—where produce, if it’s sold, is more expensive than it would be
at a grocery store. But then, as now, this historically impoverished
neighborhood didn’t have a single full-service grocery store. (Though it
does have a small worker-owned co-op, and thanks to People’s Grocery
founder Brahm Ahmadi, a larger grocery store is on the way.)
With money borrowed from a friend, Rosenthal bought a vacant
garbage-strewn lot on Center Street for $11,000 and worked with
community members to create a lush garden. This small but fecund plot
has since become City Slicker’s best known farm, home to the
twice-weekly donation-based farm stand.

Today, City Slicker Farms is thriving: it has seven “farms” scattered
around West Oakland that together yield nearly 10,000 pounds of produce
a year. The small nonprofit—it has just three full-time staffers—was
just was awarded a $4 million grant from California to buy a 1.4-acre
plot of land, its largest farm yet. The organization also has a hugely
popular backyard garden program—staff and volunteers build raised beds
and provide seeds, seedlings, compost, and even hen coops (and hens) to
low-income West Oakland residents so they can be self-sufficient,
relying on the food they grow themselves.

Last month, I met with City Slicker’s Executive Director Barbara
Finnin to talk about the challenges of farming on vacant lots, West
Oaklanders’ love of collards, kale, and eggs, and the importance of
“culturally- appropriate food” when building a just food system.

Barbara Finnin of City Slicker Farms

Tell me about the origin of City Slicker Farms.

The organization started around food access and community building.
The folks that started City Slicker Farms lived here in West Oakland,
and they were looking around and saying, “OK—where is the food access?
There are corner stores, liquor stores. We know that they don’t provide
the best food. It’s calorie sufficient and not nutrient dense. It’s
really difficult to get produce.” So the idea was, “How can we build the
community’s own capacity to grow food?”

We looked at the community’s assets. We had vacant land and we had
plenty of folks here who had come from gardening and farming
backgrounds. We work with a lot of people who have immigrated from the
south, particularly African American folks, who gardened and farmed. So
we have a lot of rich resources when it comes to knowledge.

Talk to me about City Slicker Farms’ two main programs. And
what is the difference between a “market farm” and a community garden?

There is a crucial distinction. We have a community market
farm program and a backyard garden program. The community market farm
program is for small farms—1 acre or less—that are growing food for some
kind of market. In this case, a farm stand. All the food that is
harvested on Fridays at all the farms is distributed through a farm
stand at donation-based prices.

You can see the community gardening philosophy in our backyard garden
program. We’re meeting people where they are—at their homes—to grow
their own food. I feel in all honesty that we can reach way more people
that way. If all of our community market farms were community gardens,
how many people would actually use them? Do they have time to walk down
the street to garden?

People are more motivated when they garden at their own home. It’s
also a great teaching tool. We work with grandmothers who are taking
care of their grandkids all the time, so it’s a really great way to pass
the knowledge down.

Recipients of backyard gardens can also sell their extra
produce at the Center Street farm stand. Do a lot of people take
advantage of that?

Not at all. They donate it to the farm stand or to others in the
community. We’ll have neighbors swapping or people give it to family
members. We advertise it: we’ll buy your produce. But most people want
to give back or they want to swap.

West Oakland was and still is an industrial neighborhood—do you have to import soil?

It depends on the site. We test all the soil. But all of our
locations are residentially zoned, so we don’t have to worry about
industrial contaminants from old factories. We do find issues with lead,
and we find that everywhere here because of old housing stock. Where
houses burned down, there was lots of lead that accumulated into the
soil. If there’s a low-to-medium level of lead, then we’ll build raised
beds and import the soil.

When I was at Center Street Farm the other day, I heard a rumor that it’s going to be transformed into an orchard.

The foreclosures have affected us as well. We had been getting water
from our neighbor, but that house got foreclosed upon, so we lost our
access to water. Just to get a city water meter costs between $20,000
and $40,000, depending. It’s hard to rationalize spending that much when
water doesn’t cost that much over time. Not to mention that we don’t
have the funds to pay for it. We’ve been gardening there for 10 years
and we wouldn’t even get close to $20,000 worth of water.

It’s intense to see the change: a site that was once abundant. Now
we’re transitioning to an orchard and are wheeling in buckets of water
from other neighbors. Once the trees are established, they won’t need
ongoing water. We need more fruit anyway.

City Slickers was just awarded a $4 million grant. Where did it come from and what are you going to do with it?

It was from Proposition 84—a grant to get parks and recreation
centers and parks into poor communities. We got this money to purchase
land and construct a farm and park. It is very exciting, because, with
the exception of Center Street Farm (which is owned by our founder,
Willow), we don’t own any of the land we’re on—we’re land insecure.
We’re basically at the will of whoever owns it. For instance, the owners
of one vacant lot we were on wanted us to leave so they could turn it
into a parking lot. It’s heartbreaking! People who work in urban farming
and gardening deal with this all the time.

How big is the new plot—and where is it?

We’re hoping to buy a piece of land that is nearly an acre and a
half—just down the street from Center Street on Peralta. Even though
some of it will also be lawn, and a place for children to play, it’s
definitely the biggest plot we’ll have—and we’ll be able to grow at
least double what we’re growing now.

City Slicker Farms focuses on “high-yield” crops. Can you explain?

I think the best example is corn vs. collards. Think of Center Street
Farm. If the whole thing was planted with collards, we’re going to get a
higher yield than with corn. Meaning, each corn plant only gives you a
certain number of ears. With collards you get more per plant and it’s
ongoing. They’re more like perennials. So you can harvest from it,
pulling leaves from the outside, and then the plant will keep giving you
more. We have to think in those terms because we don’t have that much
land.

When you’re planning crops, do you take into account nutrient density?

We do. So we look at yields, nutrient density and how easy it is to
grow and harvest. For instance, if we did all berries, they are very
difficult to harvest. So we have more fruiting trees instead.

Do you consider the heritage of people in the neighborhood, as well?

Every year we survey folks. We’re not going to grow things that
people don’t want to eat. So we ask everybody, are we getting you what
you need? Is there something you’re not seeing? People want to see more
fruit.

What sells out at the farm stand?

Cooking greens and eggs. Collards are probably the most popular, then
kale. Kale is tied with mustard greens. People also like chard, but
it’s not as popular as collards or kale.

How many backyard gardens does City Slicker plant a year, and would you say that most residents stick with it?

Currently we have 100 backyard gardeners in our program. When someone
enrolls in our program, we help them build a garden and partner them
with a mentor who checks in on them four times a year for a two-year
period. Since the backyard garden program launched in 2005, we’ve
planted 170 gardens.

We ask people what they want to grow, where they want to grow it. And
then on a Saturday we come and build a garden with the family—we ask
them to invite friends and family or a neighbor. If we know there’s
another backyard garden family near there, we’ll invite them over as
well, it’s all about community building.

There’s an assumption out there that low-income folks don’t
want to eat healthy foods—that those of us who can afford to eat fresh,
organic produce are pushing our values onto a community that doesn’t
share them. What do you say to that?

I want to start with this: America has a problem. Low-income people
don’t have the problem. It’s everyone. In most places, it’s easier to
get fast food then it is to get fresh, healthy produce.

Although food deserts aren’t everywhere.

But there are McDonalds everywhere. We’re talking about actual choice
here. People don’t have real choice or real options. People select our
program because they want real choice and options for healthy food in
their neighborhood.

This idea of, “Let’s help those low-income people eat better” is
elitist. I say, “No, let’s help everybody eat better.” The real barrier
is access. And real choice.

And
once the playing fields are leveled and there is affordability and
access, City Slicker Farms doesn’t need to push the produce?

We don’t push the agenda. Our programs exist and people self-select
into them. I think that’s really important. We’re here to normalize food
and the act of gardening and get young children seeing it and becoming a
part of it.

If you’re used to cereal that’s fortified, that’s food. Say you’re
not used to having fruit for breakfast. So if you want to normalize food
like berries and fruit, then you have it in abundance in your home
garden or neighborhood and you’re eating it. That’s huge! It becomes
part of your environment.

I’m not here to bang on your door and say, “eat healthily!” People
know that already. And I think that it would be very insulting to a
low-income person, “Oh, you don’t know how to eat healthily.” Instead,
we should be asking, “Do you have healthy food in your neighborhood or
do you want to learn about preparing healthy food or do you want to
share with others how you prepare healthy food?”

Right. It’s not like anyone is claiming to have a perfectly
wholesome diet. The other day when I was at Center Street Farm, some
neighborhood kids pitched in with the weeding. Later in the day, they
walked by eating Cheetos. It’s hard not to be disappointed. But at the
same time, who doesn’t have a Cheeto or Oreo occasionally?

Look: I love donuts. I loooove donuts. I want to be
real about this. And the real is this: we are surrounded by junk food.
Everybody has junk food. It’s pervasive. It’s about harm reduction in my
mind. Let’s reduce harm.

We’re not going for perfection. That’s what splinters groups and
sabotages relationships. Again, if all you had were Cheetos, that’s one
thing. But now you have Cheetos and you have collards. You have Cheetos
and Plums. That’s better.

One of the challenges of eating fresh produce, of course, is
finding the time to cook it. (And knowing how to cook.) City Slickers
does a lot of farming education, but do you do any cooking education?

We don’t do a lot. People’s Grocery and OBUGS
do more of that—we don’t want to replicate services. OBUGS will send
Chef Mo to the farm stand at Center Street, and he’ll do some cooking
demos. They were popular: smelling cooking food—that always draws people
in.

We do share residents’ recipes. All the healthy recipes in our West
Oakland Healthy Eating Guide are from folks in the neighborhood. Or
we’ll photocopy a recipe and have it at the farm stand. We did that at
Thanksgiving.

Do a lot of kids get involved at the market farms?

Center Street probably has the most action when it comes to kids. Chickens help.

At Fitzgerald and Union Plaza park we’d really like to get more youth
involvement. We’re working with the City of Oakland on shared
programming and will be giving stipends to youth to work there, so it
becomes more of a youth hangout.

Have you ever had a kid who has volunteered and then become a formal apprentice?

We’ve tried. I’ll be very honest and say that our apprenticeship
positions tend to be people who come from privilege. It’s a big risk to
go through our program—and be like, “do I have to leave my neighborhood
to become an urban farmer? Where is that job besides at City Slicker
Farms?” OK, there are landscape jobs, or you could work at a nursery.
But there aren’t that many jobs in this arena in the city. Though it’s
changing. More and more people from the neighborhood are interested in
gardening. So in the beginning, we attracted the type of youth who would
go WWOOFing
(World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms), who had had other farm
apprenticeships. We’d like to do something along the lines of Americorps,
where we recruit folks from the community and give them stipends but
they’re also provided with an education voucher and job training skills.

What is the apprenticeship stipend?

The stipend is $500 a month. We also provide housing and pay all utilities, including Internet.

You do all this with only five staff members—two of whom are
part-time—and four apprentices. So, when you get the grant $4 million
grant, will you be able to scale up the staff?

This is the beauty and downfall of the grant—people are like, “you
have $4 million—you’re doing great!” But the money does not go to
programming or operations. It’s for the sale and construction, and the
pre-construction. So I could hire a temporary person to run the
construction, but it’s not for staff.

I’m hoping to get that out loud and clear. We need to double our budget over the next few years to meet the new demands.

What’s your definition of food justice?

It’s so long! The idea of food justice to me is that everyone has
equal access to fresh, healthy, affordable food that’s culturally
appropriate. Meaning this is the food that I want to eat, not that
someone is telling me I’m supposed to eat. This is based on peoples’
food traditions.

Food justice also means that the people in the food chain are getting
good paying jobs and they’re not in harm’s way: meaning working near
pesticides and herbicides and such.

Food justice also means that the land we’re using is well taken care
of. So what kind of practices are we using in our farming? Are we
actually adding to the health of the earth and not taking away from it?
Food justice is being able to provide jobs.

It is also very much calling into play that we don’t have a just food
system now. The current reality is that if you’re in a low-income
community of color, you don’t have equal access to fresh, healthy food.
The food in your community isn’t health-promoting. There’s probably a
lot of other stressors in your neighborhood like pollution, industry. So
food justice means calling out the bad—institutional racism and class
inequalities—and then fighting to ensure that we all have equal access
to health-promoting food.

I’m particularly interested in the culturally appropriate
part. Fried chicken could be culturally appropriate. Or Popeye’s for
that matter. So is that undermining a larger food justice goal? Most
food deserts are full of this kind of fast, unhealthy food.

It’s complicated because if I have fried chicken sometimes, that’s
fine. If I have fried chicken from Popeye’s all the time because that’s
all I have, that’s different. It goes back to choice and it goes back to
harm reduction.

When my grandma cooked with lard, it wasn’t that big of a deal
because it was all fresh food. And you weren’t cooking with lard all the
time. That’s also what you had. And you had the balance of the fresh
food from the garden, the healthy chicken you were getting that weren’t
full of antibiotics.

And I don’t think it does much good to abolish certain foods.
Whole milk is one of my culturally appropriate foods. But at public
schools across the country, whole milk has been banned from cafeterias
in the name of health. As if our kids are getting fat from whole milk!

Yeah, that’s not where our problem is. I totally agree. I also want
to get back to the cultural appropriateness. I want to use myself as an
example: I grew up with casseroles. In those casseroles are things like
chicken, tuna, noodles and vegetables. I could have those ingredients be
more healthy or less healthy than others. But it’s still the idea that
that’ s what I grew up with, that’s what I’m used to. That’s what I
want. It’s comforting and I can find healthy fresh ways of preparing
that food.

What do you say to the naysayers who say about urban agriculture, “That’s great, but it won’t feed the whole city.”

We believe that urban agriculture makes a
difference. We’re very realistic. We’re growing produce and eggs. We’re
not growing field crops. We’re not growing wheat. This is a complement.
And it’s about normalizing fresh fruit and vegetables. You see Cheetos,
but you also see this.

14 December 2010

Child Nutrition Re-Authorization. The Food Safety Modernization Act. The White House Garden gets a hoop houses! For a brief summary of what's going on in U.S. food policy and politics, see my latest column for the Faster Times.

19 October 2010

A few weeks ago, I got to tag along on one of chef Matt Lightner's foraging expeditions to the Oregon Coast. With us were Merrick, the CEO of branding/ad/creative agency Tangible Worldwide, and his girlfriend (both adventurous epicureans), my dear friend Kimberley Sevcik, and Jason, a sous chef from Castagna. Wildcrafter Lars Norgren was our de facto tour guide—teaching us about a parasitic vine called dodder that wraps itself prettily around salicornia (aka pickleweed) and illuminating the forest for us by pointing out wild mountain blackberries, hedgehog mushrooms and bracket fungus, and edible (and medicinal) weeds of all sorts. Here's the story, which you can also read online inthe New York Times'T: Style.

On a recent Sunday morning, Matt Lightner, the bespectacled 29-year-old chef of the heralded Castagna Restaurant in Portland, Ore., was hunched over a bed of salicornia at Netarts Bay on the Oregon Coast. Salicornia, also known as pickleweed, is a salty-tasting succulent that grows like a weed—” wait, it is a weed!—in marshy, brackish areas.

Lightner was leading a foraging field trip of sorts. He introduced the assembled group of foodists to Lars Norgren, a towering figure with a mop of unkempt gray hair and an encyclopedic knowledge of wild plants.

"This is a salt-marsh species of lamb's quarter," said Norgren, surveying a plot of salicornia. "You could flood the Portland market for several years with this little—what is it? An eighth of an acre?"

Norgren often accompanies Lightner on his gathering forays, steering him clear of Destroying Angel mushrooms and hemlocks and singling out oddities like an orange parasitic vine called dodder. Though he was once a full-time wildcrafter (he dislikes the term "forager," preferring "wildcrafter" or "picker" instead), these days Norgren spends most of his time buying wild edibles from local pickers and selling them to Portland restaurants such as Castagna, EVOE, Le Pigeon and Nostrana via his company, Peak Forest Fruit.

Salicornia is still a marginal item, even in local-foods-obsessed Portland, where Norgren sells it at the Hollywood Farmers' Market. Lightner uses a few sprigs of the raw plant on a dish of sea urchin, caramelized beets and black-garlic puree.

"You want to get this idea that you're in the ocean," Lightner said. "The salicornia is really crisp and livens things up."

Lars Norgren and Matt Lightner at Netarts Bay, the most saline body of water on the Oregon Coast

As unlikely as it sounds, foraging is hot. A recession-friendly habit—what could be cheaper than picking weeds for your supper?—it is also a logical (if extreme) extension of the local-foods movement. Slow Food chapters across the country are touting foraging walks; companies such as the botanist John Kallas's Wild Food Adventures run sold-out edible-plant workshops and clam digs; and community gleaning organizations are popping up like mushrooms from coast to coast.

But while high-end restaurants have long featured chanterelles and ground cherries on their menus, not many chefs actually take time out of the kitchen to harvest for wild ingredients themselves.

Lightner's passion for foraging grew out of the time he spent in the Basque region of Spain, apprenticing with the chef Andoni Aduriz at the Michelin-starred Mugaritz. Aduriz and his team of foragers there collect mushrooms, flowers and wild plants in the hills surrounding the restaurant. (Lightner also spent a month working at Noma in Copenhagen under Rene Redzepi, who is also known for getting his hands dirty.)

During peak foraging times, the chef is in the forest as many as three times a week. "It's not necessarily the coast," he says, alluding mysteriously to fruitful groves that are closer to Portland.

Back on the coast, he and Norgren led their retinue into a moss-covered forest on the side of the road.

"This here is a sword fern," Norgren said. It puts up very impressive fiddleheads, but it's seriously bitter. You get people who say "fiddlehead ferns," and there is no such species as fiddlehead ferns. It's a stage of every fern!

Norgren first pointed out an evergreen huckleberry bush and a chicken of the woods mushroom: "Within a couple of days of it appearing, it's inedible; it goes from being as tender as raw meat to tough as cardboard!" He then gestured to a mat of oxalis, or wood sorrel, which Lightner was already busily collecting in a flat Tupperware container.

"Wood sorrel, which has three heart-shaped leaflets (it's often mistaken for a clover), has a sour flavor, and three times the level of iron found in spinach. We use it for a lot of things at the restaurant, from desserts to savory dishes," Lightner said. "It's acidic, so it goes well with tartares and things that could use a little sour flavor.â€ Wood sorrel is also abundant in Portland: it grows in yards, parks, even on the side of the street. Not all Portlanders can swing a meal at Castagna, but they can pluck wood sorrel from their own backyard.

Fifty years ago, wild mushrooms were as rare on Portland menus as salicornia is now. (According to Norgren, chanterelles fetched just 15 cents a pound back then.) Though salicornia likely won't gain the same foodie status as chanterelles any time soon, Lightner's innovative use of these local weeds—elevating dishes with a crunchy texture here and a sour flavor there—is exposing Castagna diners to the riches in their own backyards.

08 August 2010

One of the first things a curious eater will discover about Portland (Oregon) is the ubiquity of food-focused happy hours. Not only are house wines and daily cocktails just $5 (and local microbrews often $3)—you can usually get a full dinner for under $10 (depending on how hungry you are). I just wrote about a handful of my current favorites for the New York Times' T: Style. What are yours?

05 May 2010

Watch the trailer for the new sustainable food movement documentary “Fresh” by Ana Sofia Joanes and you’d be forgiven for dismissing it as a repeat of last year’s “Food, Inc.” The themes—America’s predominant industrial agriculture model is unsustainable, small-scale farming operations are in ascendance—are pretty much the same and both films feature “lunatic farmer” Joel Salatin as well as the man who made him famous: Michael Pollan.

But “Fresh," while covering similar ground as “Food, Inc,” is decidedly more optimistic. “Food, Inc.” is a rigorous exposé that details the horrors of factory farming, and you leave it feeling either pissed off or desolate (depending on your disposition). “Fresh,” though it offers glimpses of miserably crowded cows and pigs (and the requisite image of chicks being flung, by the pallet, down on the CAFO floor), is a celebration of mavericks such as Salatin, Will Allen, and George Naylor, who are starting mini-revolutions in Virginia, Milwaukee, and Iowa, respectively. You leave “Fresh” wanting to get your hands dirty—be it raising organic hogs or starting a container garden on your fire escape.

The truth is, filming for “Fresh” began prior to “Food, Inc.”—Joanes just didn’t have as big of a budget as “Food, Inc.” director Robert Kenner did. So Joanes and her team had to employ a creative marketing strategy. Rather than push for a traditional Hollywood distributor, they chose to launch the film in communities across the country, city-by-city, week-by-week. Specialty Studios, an unconventional film distribution company, only teamed up with Joanes in February, and president Steve Michaelson sought out Joanes, not the other way around. (By then, Joanes and her team had already done the bulk of the marketing themselves and-having elicited 2,000 requests for community screenings-didn’t think they needed a distributor at all.) Specialty Studios helped cement Joanes’ relationship with Whole Foods: “Fresh” is screening across the country during the grocery store’s new film festival, “Let’s Retake our Plates.”

Last month, the first “Fresh Week” launched in New York City on the 7th with a series of lectures (by none other than Salatin himself), book signings (Anna Lappé), and panels (Will Allen, Annie Novak of Rooftop Farms, and radical gardener/artist Fritz Haeg). There were farm-to-table dinners at Mas, Lupa, and Candle 79; a canning workshop (what else?!); and a Q&A with Mario Batali. Each of these events smartly cross-promoted the film—attendees received a voucher to see “Fresh” at Quad Cinemas. After New York, “Fresh Weeks” rolled out across the country: in Nashville, Columbus, Tempe, Arizona, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Santa Cruz, Oklahoma City, and Providence.

In Portland, I attended Joel Salatin’s wickedly smart and mischievous talk on “The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer” and was given a voucher to see the film. (There were also farm-to-table dinners in PDX—at Clarklewis, Salt, Fire, and Time and Meriwether’s.)

Joanes and her team reached out to bloggers in each city, asking them to attend “Fresh Week” events (at their own expense, apparently) and write pithy reviews of them on their own blogs.

The brilliance of this strategy is that Joanes doesn’t have to lay down much cash for marketing and distributing the film: each city (and food community) self-generates its own dinners, lectures, and screenings; bloggers aren’t paid.

The down side? Grassroots marketing doesn’t always reach the right audience. In Portland, for instance, most people in the city’s dynamic food world had no inkling that Joel Salatin was in town or that “Fresh” was screening at the city’s venerable Hollywood Theatre. And this, on the eve of the International Association of Culinary Professionals (held in Portland from April 21-24), during which thousands of chefs, cookbook writers, and urban gardening advocates descended on the city in droves. What a pity.

Though the “Fresh Weeks” wind down in June with the final one in Boston, the movie will continue to have a life via community screenings. For a small fee, you can buy the DVD and host a screening at your local library, elementary school, or college. (There’s a toolkit for this purpose on the “Fresh” web site.)

“I’ve been working in film for awhile and have never seen anything quite this creative,” says Julia Pacetti, president of JMP Verdant Communications, who was hired by Specialty Studios in mid-February to help promote the film. “It’s really been fueled from the ground up.” So far, the theatrical marketing and distribution budget for this film has been less than $100,000; Joanes spent another $130,000 for grassroots outreach. (That’s a fraction of the half a million spent on marketing and distribution for most documentaries.)

Is this the future when it comes to promoting small-budget food documentaries in this country? Food docs seem to be serving as test cases for this hybrid style of marketing—part traditional, part grassroots. “What’s on Your Plate?” which follows two Manhattan teens as they track down where their food comes from (and which I wrote about for the Atlantic Monthly), debuted on the Discovery Channel, but it too, is being shown in communities across the country via a sustainable-minded chain, Chipotle.

Watch the trailer for the new sustainable food movement documentary “Fresh” by Ana Sofia Joanes and you’d be forgiven for dismissing it as a repeat of last year’s “Food, Inc.” The themes—America’s predominant industrial agriculture model is unsustainable, small-scale farming operations are in ascendance—are pretty much the same and both films feature “lunatic farmer” Joel Salatin as well as the man who made him famous: Michael Pollan.

But “Fresh,“while covering similar ground as “Food, Inc,” is decidedly more optimistic. “Food, Inc.” is a rigorous exposé that details the horrors of factory farming, and you leave it feeling either pissed off or desolate (depending on your disposition). “Fresh,” though it offers glimpses of miserably crowded cows and pigs (and the requisite image of chicks being flung, by the pallet, down on the CAFO floor), is a celebration of mavericks such as Salatin, Will Allen, and George Naylor, who are starting mini-revolutions in Virginia, Milwaukee, and Iowa, respectively. You leave “Fresh” wanting to get your hands dirty—be it raising organic hogs or starting a container garden on your fire escape.

The truth is, filming for “Fresh” began prior to “Food, Inc.”—Joanes just didn’t have as big of a budget as “Food, Inc.” director Robert Kenner did. So Joanes and her team had to employ a creative marketing strategy. Rather than push for a traditional Hollywood distributor, they chose to launch the film in communities across the country, city-by-city, week-by-week. Specialty Studios, an unconventional film distribution company, only teamed up with Joanes in February, and president Steve Michaelson sought out Joanes, not the other way around. (By then, Joanes and her team had already done the bulk of the marketing themselves and-having elicited 2,000 requests for community screenings-didn’t think they needed a distributor at all.) Specialty Studios helped cement Joanes’ relationship with Whole Foods: “Fresh” is screening across the country during the grocery store’s new film festival, “Let’s Retake our Plates.”

Last month, the first “Fresh Week” launched in New York City on the 7th with a series of lectures (by none other than Salatin himself), book signings (Anna Lappé), and panels (Will Allen, Annie Novak of Rooftop Farms, and radical gardener/artist Fritz Haeg). There were farm-to-table dinners at Mas, Lupa, and Candle 79; a canning workshop (what else?!); and a Q&A with Mario Batali. Each of these events smartly cross-promoted the film—attendees received a voucher to see “Fresh” at Quad Cinemas. After New York, “Fresh Weeks” rolled out across the country: in Nashville, Columbus, Tempe, Arizona, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Santa Cruz, Oklahoma City, and Providence.

In Portland, I attended Joel Salatin’s wickedly smart and mischievous talk on “The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer” and was given a voucher to see the film. (There were also farm-to-table dinners in PDX—at Clarklewis, Salt, Fire, and Time and Meriwether’s.)

Joanes and her team reached out to bloggers in each city, asking them to attend “Fresh Week” events (at their own expense, apparently) and write pithy reviews of them on their own blogs.

The brilliance of this strategy is that Joanes doesn’t have to lay down much cash for marketing and distributing the film: each city (and food community) self-generates its own dinners, lectures, and screenings; bloggers aren’t paid.

The down side? Grassroots marketing doesn’t always reach the right audience. In Portland, for instance, most people in the city’s dynamic food world had no inkling that Joel Salatin was in town or that “Fresh” was screening at the city’s venerable Hollywood Theatre. And this, on the eve of the International Association of Culinary Professionals (held in Portland from April 21-24), during which thousands of chefs, cookbook writers, and urban gardening advocates descended on the city in droves. What a pity.

Though the “Fresh Weeks” wind down in June with the final one in Boston, the movie will continue to have a life via community screenings. For a small fee, you can buy the DVD and host a screening at your local library, elementary school, or college. (There’s a toolkit for this purpose on the “Fresh” web site.)

“I’ve been working in film for awhile and have never seen anything quite this creative,” says Julia Pacetti, president of JMP Verdant Communications, who was hired by Specialty Studios in mid-February to help promote the film. “It’s really been fueled from the ground up.” So far, the theatrical marketing and distribution budget for this film has been less than $100,000; Joanes spent another $130,000 for grassroots outreach. (That’s a fraction of the half a million spent on marketing and distribution for most documentaries.)

Is this the future when it comes to promoting small-budget food documentaries in this country? Food docs seem to be serving as test cases for this hybrid style of marketing—part traditional, part grassroots. “What’s on Your Plate?” which follows two Manhattan teens as they track down where their food comes from (and which I wrote about for the Atlantic Monthly), debuted on the Discovery Channel, but it too, is being shown in communities across the country via a sustainable-minded chain, Chipotle.

21 February 2010

On a family vacation in Ohio's Cuyahoga National Park a few years ago, fifth grade New Yorkers Sadie Hope-Gund and Safiyah Kai Riddle saw a chicken lay an egg and tasted the best cherry tomatoes "ever."

"I was like, 'Woah'," recalls Safiyah, now an 8th grader at the Manhattan Academy of Technology in Chinatown. "I thought you see everything in New York. You see everything—but not farming!"

The seeds had been planted for "What's on your Plate?" a documentary the girls spent the next two years making with Sadie's mom, filmmaker Catherine Gund. The movie, which aired last week on the Discovery Channel's Planet Green, is a spirited look at our unsustainable food system and how we can change it.

Two weeks ago, I sat down with Sadie, Safiyah, and Catherine over slices of (locally made!) Balthazar cake to talk about "bad" vegetarians, why good food should not be a luxury, and the importance of not telling other people what to eat. Check out my blog about the movie, which I did for the Atlantic Monthly's food channel. An edited Q&A of my conversation with the gals is now up at The Faster Times.

05 January 2010

Food trends are typically followed
by parallel trends in wine. Witness the recent focus on organic, biodynamic,
and local wines—at restaurants and wine shops across the country. But, just as
the locavore movement has begun spurning mere organic produce (consecrating
“beyond organic” farmers such as Joel Salatin as movement heros), fans of
terroir—let’s call them terroir-ists—are touting something called natural wines.

For a quick primer, read my blog about natural wine bars (and restaurants with extensive natural wine selections), published in T: Magazine's The Moment blog. If you haven’t read Alice
Feiring’s bookThe Battle for Wine
and Love, you should. (For Alice
Feiring’s definition of natural wines, see here.
There is, so far, no certification process or label for natural wines.)

16 December 2009

I've been thinking a lot about public school lunches lately—not just
because it's a subject that's perpetually in the news these days. For
the past few months, I've been volunteering at Public School 157 in
Bed-Stuy, for a grassroots non-profit called Wellness in the Schools.
I'm part of the salad bar squad: I slice and chop veggies, prepare bean
and pasta salads, and serve the kids both. Though New York City
lunchrooms still have a long way to go—we can't get local produce or
any olive oil, for instance (using subpar soy oil for salad
dressings)—at least these first, second, and third graders of all
ethnicities are enthusiastic about eating carrots, cucumbers, and
celery. It's only taken a few months, but now it's the rare student
who passes the salad bar by without at least trying something.

So it was with great interest that I listened to this NPR segment on how the milk industry is lashing out at parents at this Boulder, Colorado school for taking chocolate milk off the menu.

"Chocolate milk is soda in drag," one mom (nickname: "the renegade
lunch lady") says to NPR reporter Jeff Brady, noting that it has 3.1
grams of sugar per ounce. (Soda has 3.3.)

Apparently, this school isn't the only one to ban chocolate milk.
The dairy industry, worried about losing more milk drinkers nationwide,
has rather desperately launched a "Raise your hand for chocolate milk"
campaign on Facebook including this propaganda-filled video. (Hmmm... I
wonder how much these dieticians and actors were paid to say that
chocolate milk is just as healthy as regular milk?)

Has it really gotten so bad that parents can't persuade their kids
to drink plain whole milk? Oh—that's right, whole milk is not an
option anymore, at least in New York City public schools where city
education officials removed it from cafeterias in 2006. At PS 157, the
only choices kids have are low-fat or skim milk and low-fat chocolate
milk. If I were them, I'd probably choose chocolate milk, too. Who
wants to drink blue-ish skim milk or watery-tasting 1% milk?

The truth is, kids are not getting fat from drinking whole milk.
(When was the last time you saw a 3rd grader guzzling whole milk? I
think that'd actually be cause for celebration.) I'm with Nina Planck on this subject—you
need the saturated fat that's in whole milk to absorb the calcium and
fat-soluble vitamins in milk. Whereas sugar (and an early addiction to
it) leads to everything from ADD to cavities to diabetes.

As we say at the P.S. 157 cafeteria, one step at a time. We've got
the kids eating fresh veggies on a daily basis—maybe next semester
we'll figure out how to get some seasonal produce from New York state
farms. And maybe, like that Boulder school, we can tackle the chocolate
milk issue soon.

Second-grader Ella Lyons says it best, "No one's going to get
regular milk if we have chocolate milk, because, I think, they're going
to like it better because it tastes better...But it's not good for you,
so I think we shouldn't have chocolate milk."

The show also contains a strange medley of pro and anti-meat figures from biochemist T. Colin Campbell (anti) to star chef Anthony Bourdain (very much pro). Nutritionist Nancy Rodriguez
is vehemently in favor of eating meat in moderation; novelist Jonathan
Safran Foer, who has just written a book about being a vegetarian, Eating Animals, weighs in, too. (I told you it was an odd melee.)

Aside from the squirm-inducing questions from King himself—at one
point he pointedly asks the grandmother of Kevin, a healthy
two-year-old who died of gangrene of the small intestines after eating
E. coli-tainted ground beef, if his death was painful. Looking
dumbfounded, the woman answers, “Yes, Larry, it was very painful”—the
show was disappointing on many levels. I know talking heads go through
media training that tell them to inflexibly hammer home their points,
but the back and forth between Campbell and Rodriguez was circular and
skirted around the (to me) crucial distinction between factory-farmed
beef and beef that’s been raised humanely and safely by small-scale
farms.

Campbell’s argument is that the caseins in protein help “turn on” cancer growth—his book the China Study details the results of a large-scale study that Campbell directed in the 70’s and 80’s which surveyed death rates for twelve different kinds of cancer for more 65 rural counties in China. (The outcome, according to the book’s web site
was “People who ate the most animal-based foods got the most chronic
diseases…”) Rodriguez respectfully disagrees, pointing out that animal
protein is a more efficient way to get essential nutrients and vitamins
such as amino acids, iron and B vitamins. She concedes that “diligent”
vegans can get enough zinc and amino acids but says meat is a more
practical source for most Americans. The average American is not going
to start consuming large quantities of lentils and Brewer’s Yeast (or
fortified soy milk), for example.

What neither of them delve into is what type of meat
they’re talking about here. When Campbell carried out his research in
China, was the meat that the Chinese ate from pastured animals?
(Disclaimer: I have not read the China Study, so have no idea, but I’m
guessing the answer is no.) Were they doused with antibiotics the way
most cattle raised for consumption are here in the U.S.? And when
Rodriguez talks about feeling absolutely safe serving her son
hamburgers off the grill, is she serving him Cargill burgers or those
from Niman Ranch?

The person who gets closest to raising this issue is Bourdain, an
adventurous traveler and eater who loves meat—but who does not love the
industrial system that raises it here in the U.S. His succinct rant was
a gem, and elicited a simple “Wow” from Larry King:

If you look at our basic design…we have
eyes in the front of our head. We have fingernails. We have high teeth
and long legs…we have evolved so that we can chase down smaller,
stupider creatures, kill them and eat them. That said, we may be
designed to eat meat—we are not designed to eat fecal coliform
bacteria. And I think the standard practices of outfits like Cargill
and some of the larger meat processors and grinders in this country are
unconscionable and border on the criminal.

Yet Bourdain didn’t single out the type of meat he prefers to eat, presumably the kind that does not come from gargantuan meat processors such as Cargill.
This would’ve been an excellent opportunity to give a shout-out to a
small family-run farm whose meat is of such superior quality that it
probably never tests positive for this dangerous strain of E. coli.

Safran Foer, too, notes that 99% of the meat that’s raised in this
country comes from factory farms. Right, but we CAN choose that 1% that
is not factory farmed, no? (Especially in Brooklyn, I yelled
through my computer screen to Safran Foer, who lives in the foodie
borough, too.) But really, all over the country…in rural Utah. In fast-food restaurants in Oregon and Washington. Even in Missouri.
But instead, Foer seems to be saying, being a vegetarian is the only
practical choice to this practically inescapable industrial food system.

Foer briefly touches on his ethical reasons for spurning meat,
arguing with Bourdain’s logic that eating animals is somehow “natural”:
“The entirety of human progress is defying what is natural. If we were
so concerned with what is natural, we wouldn’t obviously be in this
studio right now, having this conversation.” (He expands on the ethical
side of his reasoning in an excerpt from his soon-to-be-published book in the food issue of the New York Times Magazine.)

Thankfully, Marler gets the last word in, though, asking the Beef
Manufacturers Association to be more transparent with the public.
Private companies should, for example, post the results of the USDA’s
inspections on their web sites. (Not surprisingly, Patrick Boyle from the American Meat Institute did not think this was a good idea.)

Note: Author Jonathan Safran Foer responded to this article on The Faster Timeshere.

16 October 2009

These days, it’s not easy keeping up on the latest in Food Politics.
That’s why I decided to start a regular “Friday Round-Up” column,
supplying you with links to the latest stories and blogs on everything
from school lunch reform to urban foraging.

Speaking of which:

• Urban Foraging. You hear a lot of people
complaining these days about how expensive it is to eat a nutritious,
local diet. If you’re sick of shelling out $5 for organic salad greens
(and haven’t figured out the perks of a CSA yet), get some tips from
two of my Faster Times colleagues, Rachel Wharton and Sarah
Karnasiewicz, both of whom have recently written about foragers. Rachel’s story on Wildman Steve Brill, who is still leading his popular tours in New York’s Central Park is in this month’s Edible Manhattan; Sarah interviews Langdon Cook, author of the new book Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager, in Salon.
Cook, who worked for corporate America for many years (where he’d scarf
down lunch in 20 minutes at his desk—sound familiar?), forages in the
mountains and waterways of the Puget Sound. Brill, on the other hand,
is an urban forager: he picks dandelions and purslane from the cracks
between the sidewalk and snags mushrooms such as hen-of-the-woods from
oak trees in Central Park.

• School Lunch Reform. This week is National School
Lunch Week, which seems appropriate judging by the amount of ink
spilled lately on efforts around the country to reform lunches at
public schools. It’s not clear to me what, if anything, happened this
past week to commemorate it, but President Obama’s proclamation (as
quoted on Obamafoodarama) makes it sound as though he’s got something up his sleeve:

In the coming months, my Administration
will continue our partnership with Federal, State, and local leaders to
strengthen the National School Lunch Program. We must work together to
remove barriers that prevent some eligible children from receiving
meals, and update nutrition standards to reflect the latest Dietary
Guidelines for Americans.

Let’s just hope things don’t go haywire, as they have in New York
City, where misguided attempts to banish unhealthy food from the
schools has led to the banning of bake sales. Getting rid of soda and vending machines I can understand—but bake sales? Really folks. Removing whole milk
and home-made cookies from our schools overlooks the true culprits of
childhood obesity: processed snack foods and sugary sodas. (Not to
mention the horrible canned and frozen/reheated grub that passes as
food at most school cafeterias. Oh, yeah, and the fact that gym is
being cut at many schools.) And what are sports teams going to do to
raise money, now?

Meanwhile, also in Edible Manhattan was an excellent story by Jan Greenberg about Chef Bill Telepan and a group called Wellness in the Schools.
Telepan, like others in this country, realize that much can be done to
improve the quality of cafeteria food at the local level. He volunteers
one day a week at his daughter’s school, P.S. 87, and has been
instrumental in creating themed-food days such as Salad Day,
Hormone-Free Milk Day, and even Grass-Fed Beef Day. (School officials
put the kibosh on this last one; apparently no raw meat is allowed to
cross the threshold of public school kitchens in NYC.)

Finally, the profile on Naked Chef Jamie Oliver in the New York Times Magazine’s
food issue, while not solely about Oliver’s efforts to reform school
lunch programs in Huntington, West Virginia, is all about the young
chef’s next T.V. show: “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution” in which he
challenges middle-and-low income Americans to eat and cook healthy
food. (Oliver has chosen Huntington as the site of his next “Jamie
Oliver Challenge” based on stats from the CDC that showed that half of
the adults in the Huntington-Ashland metro area are obese and that the
area has the dubious distinction of leading the country in rates of
heart disease and diabetes.) It will be remarkable if Oliver can
achieve in the U.S. what he did in the U.K., with his program “Jamie’s
School Dinners.”: “When he eventually succeeded in getting them to
abandon their processed poultry and fries and eat his food, the
teachers reported a decrease in manic behavior and an increase in
concentration,” says journalist Alex Witchel. “The school nurses noted
a reduction in the number of asthma attacks. Those findings…were the
impetus for the British government to invest more than a billion
dollars to overhaul school lunches.”

15 October 2009

Last week, I wrote up a quick summary
of Michael Moss’s chilling article about this country’s byzantine
network of slaughterhouses and meat processing facilities, where no-one
takes accountability for the safety of our food supply.

Yesterday, I got an e-mail from a New York City market called the New Amsterdam Market
reminding me that there is an alternative to the industrial model.
Founded in 2005, the New Amsterdam Market is a monthly venue (located
down at Manhattan’s South Street Seaport) that showcases local produce,
cheese, and meat as well as regionally-made prepared food such as
porchetta sandwiches, popsicles, and Mexican-style chocolate. But what
distinguishes New Amsterdam from most farmers’ markets is that it is
comprised of purveyors—i.e. the cheesemongers and shop owners who sell
regionally-made food for regional farmers (who often don’t have the
time or desire to sit at a stand for six + hours on the weekend).

“Two Master Butchers Take on a Half Pig Under the Brooklyn Bridge,” the press release announced.

Intrigued, I read on.

On October 25th, the market “will feature farmers and meat ranchers,
regional distributors, butchers, and purveyors who can trace and
identify the source of every pound of meat sold to the public, even to
the specific head of cattle.” In addition to purveyors and farmers
selling sustainably raised meat, there would be a meat cutting
demonstration by fourth-generation butcher Josh Applestone (whose
Kingston, NY meat store, Fleisher’s Grassfed and Organic Meats helped reintroduce
the concept of local sourcing and a revival of the art of butchering)
and Tom Mylan, erstwhile butcher from [Brooklyn foodie destination] Marlow & Sons. (Mylan also helped open the nearby sustainable butcher shop Marlow & Daughters and is now working on launching another butcher shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.)

Yes, but would the Market be selling sustainably-raised, grassfed
hamburger meat? And if so, would the local purveyors and farmers be
able to “trace and identify every pound” of that ground beef? Could
they ensure me that there would be no ammonia-doused “filler” from
Uruguay or enormous squalid slaughterhouses in Omaha?

I called up New Amsterdam Market director Robert LaValva to find out.

LaValva was sure there’d be no “filler” from Uruguay, but he put me on to Jake Dickson, owner of the new Dickson’s Farmstand Meats
in New York’s Chelsea Market to answer the rest of my questions.
Dickson will have a stand at the New Amsterdam Market on October 25th.
I immediately went to his web site and read up on his philosophy:

But most of the meat available to the US
consumer leaves much to be desired. It embodies the worst of our
industrial agriculture practices and what is widely available is of
poor quality. It doesn’t have to be this way! There are small scale,
environmentally conscientious farmers producing healthy, delicious,
artisanal meats right here in New York State! These are farmers who
care about the animals and the land on which they are raised. These are the people I wanted to work with and whom I continue to seek out on your behalf.

I like this guy! Furthermore, if you click on “Our Farms,” you can
see the eight or so local farms Dickson buys his meat from. (There are
short blurbs on each farmer, too, so you can find out how each farm
produces its meat. The cows at Herondale Farm, for instance, graze the
fields as long as the grass grows, after which they enjoy the alfalfa
baleage and hay that is put up for the winter. A little map shows you
how many miles it is from farm to market: 250.) Talk about traceability.

So I called Dickson to find out where he sources his grass-fed beef.
I caught him driving back from Double L Ranch, a small facility near
Albany that slaughters his meat. (He was driving the carcasses back to
NYC where he butchers them on location at his Chelsea Market shop.)

“Right now I have three-and-a-half steers and eight lambs in the
back of my truck,” he said. I asked him about his process for making
hamburger meat.

“We try to use one steer at a time,” Dickson told me. “We never mix
farms—always single farms. And 98% of the time it is a single animal as
well. Our general rule is single farm, single animal.”

Dickson went on to tell me about the inconsistent quality of
grass-fed beef. “Most of the grass-fed beef out there is of very low
quality,” he said. “The variation in grass-fed is much wider than it is
with corn-fed. It’s much harder to do well.” He cautioned that
“grass-fed” has become such a buzzword these days that many producers
and purveyors (and restaurants) throw it around without defining the
term. To Dickson, grass-fed cow meat means the cows were “100%
grass-fed and grass-finished.” Dickson is not one to believe that
grass-fed cows are inherently better than corn fed, though. “They have
a different flavor and a different texture,” he said. “There are good
and bad variations of both.” Indeed, he sells an organic grain-finished
beef from Wrighteous Organics in Schoharie, NY.

LaValva had said something earlier in the morning that stuck with
me. “You read about the E. coli scares and all they [the USDA] do is
talk about increasing inspections. They don’t think, ‘Maybe this whole
system needs to be thrown out.’ If the meat is that cheap, it means
you’re compromising something along the way. Should meat be cheap? Why
not have that debate?”

What do you think? Should meat be cheap?

And how many of you have a relationship with your neighborhood butcher? (No, not that kind of relationship…)

06 October 2009

This past weekend, I was fortunate enough to be in Toronto for both Nuit Blanche and a fundraiser "picnic" for Slow Food Toronto and Evergreen,
a non-profit organization that makes cities more livable by creating
and restoring outdoor spaces. The event was held at the spectacular Brick Works facility
in the Don River Valley—a former brick quarry and factory that dates
back to 1889 and that's used for a weekly farmers' market, chef
workshops, sustainability fairs, etc. It will soon be the site for
Evergreen's ambitious new environmental community center, slated to open in summer of 2010. (In fact, that's what this fundraiser was for: generating funds to finish the construction.)

First of all, forgive me, because I did not take notes. You try
scribbling in a notebook while carrying a wine glass in one hand (you
only get one for the entire picnic) and a compostable bamboo plate in
the other. So I rely purely on my fickle memory and the memory of my
boyfriend and our friends (Torontonians)—and the handful of business
cards and menus I swiped from various food stands.

The theme of this year's picnic was "locally global"—a celebration
of Toronto's diverse food traditions. Each chef (specializing in
Mexican, Indian, Middle Eastern, etc. cuisines) was paired with a
leading locavore chef and a local grower to showcase a seasonal
ingredient.

Chef Jamie Kennedy Making Pakoras

Anyway, the wait was worth it: crispy heirloom bean pakoras (above) with yogurt raita or a smokey eggplant salsa. After this, things get a little foggy, no doubt helped by a glass of Steam Whistle pilsner and a generous swig of Frogpond Farm's
standout organic cabernet-merlot. (Frogpond is one of two certified
organic wineries in Ontario.) I had a plateful of Argentinian goodness
from a restaurant called Canoe:
steak tartare, lamb empanada, and a salted tongue (a delicacy I saved
for my meat-loving boyfriend); a diminutive pulled pork taco; and a
lovely spear of butter chicken and stewed apricots. Clearly, this all
called for another wine pairing, so I refilled my glass with a touch of
organic and biodynamic merlot from Southbrook Vineyard.

As the five of us slowly made our way over to the dessert area, I
looked up from my now-empty plate long enough to notice that several
eaters were in a similar state of post-prandial bliss: walking around
the barn-like room with dazed expressions, licking their fingers and
looking for the next delectable morsel. (Mind you, there were over 60
restaurants present so it did get a bit overwhelming. What is it about
being human that makes you want to try everything?)

The
thing about these Slow Food events, where zillions of top chefs and
local producers are vying for your attention, is that they tend to be
fairly insular. (Well-heeled foodies hitting a never-ending smorgasbord
of the best local food and wine...I must admit, it does sound elitist.)
However, this was hardly a navel-gazing event. Proceeds from the
tickets supported two worthy causes: in this case, both Slow Food
Toronto (which defends biodiversity and supports small-scale,
sustainable, local economies) and Evergreen's new facility, which will
eventually house a native plant nursery and garden center, a "green
job" training program for area youth, food gardens, farmers' markets,
hands-on geology exhibits, and so on. (For more on Evergreen Brick Works, see here.)

Sweet: Ontario Peaches

So then, back to dessert. I tried a prune streusel cake with a dollop of whipped cream from Crush Wine Bar; a tiny piece of Matchbox Garden carrot cake (made with heirloom carrots by Amuse-Bouche chefs Jason Inniss and Bertrand Alépée), topped with a sprig of lavender; a sliver of fresh Ontario peach that blew me away (above); and a Hungarian dumpling with plums from Loïc Gourmet.
Just to prove that I could exercise some restraint, I skipped the
homemade honey ice-cream, made with honey from the hives that sit atop
the Royal York hotel.

Everyone agreed that the culinary highlight of the day was a pear-pumpkin fritter (made by Brook Kavanagh from La Palette), with a cinnamon-and-maple syrup custard interior. The organic pears were sourced from Ontario's Lincoln Line Orchards and the pumpkins (which were puréed and added to the batter) were from a nearby farm called Psennings.

Earlier in the afternoon, when I was still hungry and sober, I'd spoken to a woman from Farm Start,
an Ontario-based non-profit that offers support and training to a new
generation of farmers, in some cases linking them up with "mentor
farms." Canada's farmers are aging: the number of farmers under the age
of 35 has declined from 25% in 1991 to 12% in 2001.

Standing in the Brick Works with my empty plate, I was not worried
about the future of small farms. I was surrounded by chefs committed to
serving seasonal cuisine, growers ready to supply it, and regular
people more than happy to pay for it. Judging by the turnout at this
fundraiser, Canada's Slow Food movement, like the U.S.'s, is alive and
well.

Even though I've been a beer drinker all my life—my father used to
homebrew the stuff and I once thirstily grabbed a Coke bottle from the
fridge, only to discover mid-gulp that it was a dusky porter—I'd never,
until this summer, seen a hop.

As it happens, the town I grew up in—Salem—is a mere 10 miles from
what was once the hop-producing capital of the world: Independence,
Oregon. In the 40's, the population of Independence swelled to 50,000
during hop season—with hop-harvesters camping out on the side of the
road. Though hop production waned in the 50's, Independence is still
the center of much hop activity, including the farm that supplies
Oregon's own craft brewer Rogue Ales.

Hops before the harvest at Rogue's farm

As Dustin, a handsome young Rogue employee, showed an assembled
group of journalists (and the crew from a new T.V. pilot lamely called
"Beer Men") around the farm, he told us some hop history: it was Pliny
the Elder who first documented hops, in his Naturalis Historia, but the Germans were the ones to first brew beer, in 732 AD. Of the three species of hop plant, it is Humulus lupulus that
is used to flavor and stabilize beer. Dustin then led us into the
high-ceilinged hop plant, with its well-worn stairs and rickety cat
walks. I was bewildered by the masses of conveyor belts and pulleys
going every which way. It all seemed so archaic and intricate.
Thankfully, it was the day before harvest, so none of the machines were
running. (I hear it's a deafening clatter.)

Dustin
assured us that the guys who operate the machinery use food-grade
quality oil and lubricants. It was at this moment that I realized I'd
never once contemplated the origins of my beer—let alone that beer
production involves such marvels of engineering, long before it's even
brewed or bottled.

From Independence, I drove north with my friend Lisa Donoughe (founder and director of Watershed Communications, who had organized this hop trip) to the town of Mt. Angel. Better known for a Benedictine monastery and its Alvar Aalto-designed library, Mt. Angel is located smack dab in the middle of Oregon farm country.

After a tour of the Annen Brothers' hop collection facility, we met
Gayle Goschie, a 3rd generation hop farmer who is turning heads in the
beer industry with her commitment to sustainable farming practices.
Gayle, along with her brothers Gordon and Glenn, farm 400 acres of
hops, and sells them to everyone from Anheuser Busch to craft brewers
such as Bridgeport and Deschutes Brewery.

Though most hop farmers say it's "impossible" to grow organic hops
(particularly in Oregon, where powdery and downy mildew, mites, and
aphids thrive), Gayle has started an experimental 6-acre organic plot.
Instead of artificial chemicals or fertilizers, she plants companion
plants like garlic and sprays wintergreen and spearmint oils to attract
beneficial insects such as ladybugs. Last year, this organic plot
thrived, but this past spring was extremely wet, which meant that
aphids and downy mildew were out in full force. Nonetheless, Goschie
recently told me that Deschutes enthusiastically
purchased the majority of her organic crop this year, and is working
hard to produce a 100% organic beer. (Interestingly, most beers that
are USDA-certified organic are not necessarily made with organic hops,
since they are still fairly hard to source—and cost twice as much as
conventional hops. A product needs to be comprised of 95% organic
ingredients to get the USDA organic label and organic beers do that by
sourcing organic malted barely and wheat. Both Wolaver's and Peak
are trying to source 100% of their hops organically, but haven't gotten
there yet.) The Goschies are growing many varieties of organic hops
including Willamette, Fuggle, Cascade, Teamaker, and Centennial.
They're also testing 24 S.S. Steiner experimental varieties, as well as
Summit and First Gold hops grown on low-trellises.

Gayle's eyes lit up as she told us about all she was learning from
growing and nurturing organic hops. "I'm curious to know what's the
difference in the hop cone between organic and conventional," she said.
She's already noticed that organic hops are not as uniform as
conventional hops. She's learned to discourage spider mites by allowing
the foliage cover to stay put (instead of weeding it as conventional
hop growers do). "Spider mites winter in the soil," she said. "They
don't build if it's not hot—they won't come up the vine."

But as with wine, organic is just one certification for hop farmers
to strive for. Goschie Farms is one of the few hop farms in the U.S. to
be certified Salmon Safe.

When I first heard about this eco-label, I did a double-take. What on earth could inland hop production have to do with salmon?

It turns out that many conventional farming practices in the
Northwest hurt the salmon population: pesticide runoff, erosion, and
damage to animal habitats to name a few. Salmon-Safe certifies
everything from Willamette Valley hazelnuts to Walla Walla wines;
recently, Real Simple magazine rated Salmon-Safe as one of 8 eco-safe labels you can trust. Hops are a new addition to the nonprofit Salmon-Safe's repertoire.

"A lot of this, including integrated pest
management techniques, we were already doing," Goschie told us with
obvious pride. Thanks to her grandfather, who started farming the
Silverton land in 1905, she and her brothers know the benefits of
composting, pest management, and polyculture. (They also grow specialty
seeds, grass, and even some wine grapes.) Before seeking the Salmon-
Safe certification, the Goschies had already converted to drip
irrigation (as opposed to pipes, which waste a lot of water) and had
installed moisture monitors in the field. Compost goes on all fields
and they plant native grasses between their farm and the highways to
prevent sediment runoff. (This is important so sediments don't
ultimately cover nearby fish breeding areas.)

Goschie Farms and Sod Busters (another Oregon hop farm) are the only
two to be certified Salmon-Safe in the country—and Deschutes is (as far
as I know) the only brewery to promote lines of salmon-safe beer: Green Lakes Organic and Hop Trip
(a fresh hop beer). Green Lakes, which had a clever ad campaign ("How
to Drink Like a Fish...") deconstructing the Salmon-Safe label, is a
limited release beer that's only available in the western states—oh,
and Texas.

19 September 2009

A few weeks ago, I read this article in the Times about a new labeling program ironically called "Smart Choices,"
that is clearly a desperate attempt by various food conglomerates to
counter the sustainable food revolution. Nutritionally bereft foods
such as Cocoa Krispies, Froot Loops, Fudgsicles and Hellman's Mayo have
made the list and get a cheery green check mark and the "Smart Choices"
imprimatur. (The official-looking logo says, "Smart Choices Program:
Guiding Food Choices.) Companies such as Kellogg’s, Kraft Foods, ConAgra Foods, Unilever, General Mills, PepsiCo and Tyson Foods
have all signed up and the entire program is chaired by a nutritionist
(!!) named Eileen T. Kennedy, who is the dean of the Friedman School of
Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts.

This makes my blood boil.

I was raised to be skeptical of food labels, to examine the
"Ingredients" lists on packaging and steer clear of foods that had
sugar as one of the first three ingredients. My folks only allowed us
to have Golden Grahams and other specious excuses for cereal (which at
the time, of course, my sister and I adored!) for dessert. And guess
what? I didn't have my first cavity until I was a senior in high
school.

But I well know that my family was not typical. And when a parent
who is shopping for cereal sees a label that seemingly tells them the
food is healthy, they may believe or want to believe that it's true. I
wish that most people knew better, but the fact is—they don't.

So where is our government on this? How can we stop the madness?

William Neuman, in his article, said that the FDA and and Department
of Agriculture had sent a letter to the Smart Choices organizers,
saying they "intended to monitor its effect on the food choices of
consumers." That's a start, but it's not exactly going to stop the
program in its tracks.

Then I read on Marion Nestle's site that Mike Smith of Change.org
has organized a letter-writing campaign asking the nutritionists on the
board of Smart Choices to resign. If you, too are outraged by this
insidious labeling initiative and believe that Teddy Graham's and Froot
Loops (41% sugar) are— if not evil—better reserved for the rare
snacking indulgence, please take a moment to write a letter to the Smart Choices folks.

Nearly 4,000 people have already done so and—get this—Tufts
University, the American Diabetes Association, AND the American
Dietetic Association have all asked that their names be removed from
the Smart Choices site.

08 September 2009

This post originally appeared on the Faster Times, generating dozens of comments. Clearly the subject of what does, indeed, cause a red wine headache is still controversial—and it's still up for debate.

A few weeks ago, I posted an article about natural wines—just one of the many "green" wines that are getting more attention (and accolades)
these days. There's also certified organic wine. Wine made from organic
grapes. Biodynamic wine. And—murkiest of all—"sustainable" wine.

A friend recently posted on Facebook that she'd finally come to the
conclusion that she can't drink red wine anymore—she wakes up in the
middle of the night with raging headaches. Several people (including
me) posted that she's probably sensitive to sulfites and that she
should give sulfite-free wines a try. (Another friend posited that it
was the histamines in red wine that give people headaches—this actually
seems more plausible to me since white wines typically contain more sulfites than red. Reds have more natural preservatives in the form of tannins.)

A discussion ensued about which wines do and do not contain sulfites. Here's the scoop:
all wines contain some naturally-occurring sulfites—they are produced
by yeast during the fermentation process. In the U.S. any wine that is
"USDA Certified Organic" cannot contain any added sulfites. Those
organic wines that do contain small amounts of added sulfites
are labeled "made from organic grapes." Winemakers with this label add
no more than 100 ppm (parts per million) total sulfites—in the form of
sulfur dioxide (known as SO2).

This recent radio program from KQED in California tries to clear up
some of the confusion about all these different eco-wine categories,
including this controversial issue of "added sulfites." Reporter Andrea
Kissack talks to so-called biodynamic winemaker Tim Thornhill from Parducci Winery
and also interviews skeptics who gripe that natural wines have an
"organic funk." Towards the end of the segment, she quizzes Luc Erotran
from San Francisco's Terroir Natural Wine Merchant who shuns winemakers who are trying to "surf the green wave" and gives his own definition of natural wines.

According to the Organic Wine Journal,
the use of added sulfites is a subject of much debate in the organic
winemaking community. "Many vintners favor their use, in extremely
small quantities, to help stabilize wines, while others frown on them
completely," reads the copy on the Organic Wine Journal's site.

While there's nothing inherently wrong with sulfites—they help wines
with any kind of shelf life avoid premature oxidation or possible
spoilage—they are a chemical and according to the USDA, 1% of the
population is sensitive to them. For more on the still-mysterious
subject of Red Wine Headaches, check out this article by Marian Burros.

04 September 2009

Just in time for the labor day weekend, New York City's Health Department unveiled its latest public health campaign
earlier this week: a series of in-your-face ads warning New Yorkers of
the health perils of drinking too much soda and other sugary beverages.(See ad, above.)

This seems like a no brainer to me. Ever notice how in other countries, where obesity rates are much lower,
Coke and Pepsi bottles (not to mention bottles of juice, Orangina, and
sports drinks) come in comparatively petite sizes for roughly the same
price?

Actually,
these bottles are not petite, they're normal. We've just gotten so used
to drinking Big Gulps (32 oz and up) and Venti Frappuccinos (yes,
"Venti"=20 ounces) that those European sizes seem quaint and
old-fashioned.

But this morning, as I surveyed the comments over at the New York Times' City Room blog,
I see that my approving reaction is not a common one. (Or at least, if
it is, it's not being shared on the comments section of Sewell Chan's
story.)

The critiques range from the aesthetic ("For the life of me, I
couldn’t tell that it was human fat, pouring out of that bottle...It
took them three years and over a quarter-of-a-million dollars to come
up with this? Sigh.") to the anti-authoritarian ("I look forward to a
day when the NYC public health department will remind me to wipe my own
bum and chew with my mouth closed, don’t take out the second mortgage,
and look both ways before I cross the street.").

If you read all 70 comments, a theme emerges: New Yorkers don't like
being told what to do. (Surprise, surprise.) And furthermore, they
don't think this 3-month public health campaign will change peoples'
habits. One post-er, who calls himself "Consumer Scientist" wrote:

I don’t
know who moderated and interpreted the focus groups behind this but, as
a senior researcher with over 30 years of conducting qualitative
research supporting all kinds of public health campaigns, I know that
the “billy club” approach to issues advertising has almost no effect.
I’ve been involved in campaigns promoting condom use, vaccinations,
cholesterol control and glucose management. In each case, we learned
that a softer and more sympathetic approach wins hearts and minds.

These
jarring ads may be satisfying for advocates who want to “stick it in
the face” of their targets but average consumers tend to react with
offense and resentment. Mostly, they dismiss the message as “just not
about me.” It’s really a waste of public resources to indulge in
campaigns that will have so little impact.

Consumers
tend to talk back and argue with ads that are meant to batter them.
Even though I tend to avoid sugared drinks, I started thinking, “If
they replace Coke with milk, given the high incidence of lactose
intolerance in New York, no one will be able to travel by subway any
longer.”

I found this enlightening, having never studied what
types of advertising "works" when it comes to public health issues.
(Yet I do know from living through the pro-active public health years
of the Thomas Friedan/Bloomberg
team in NYC that a combination of taxing and banning substances that
cause chronic illness is an effective two-pronged approach. Frieden's antismoking efforts decreased the number of smokers in the Big Apple by 350,000 and cut teen smoking in half.)

02 September 2009

A few months ago, I heard an interview on the Leonard Lopate Show with Josh Viertel, the new president of Slow Food USA and Ruth Reichl, the editor of Gourmet.

I was impressed with both speakers, but especially with how Viertel framed the new goals for Slow Food's U.S. chapter: he wants the organization to shift its focus from merely celebrating slow food (i.e. healthy, fresh, seasonal food that takes longer than five minutes to consume) to making it accessible to all Americans—especially to kids. "Food that's good for you, for the environment and for the people who grow it," Viertel said, "Is not a privilege, it's a universal right."

Viertel has put his words into action by organizing Time For Lunch, a national campaign that kicks off on Labor Day with Eat Ins around the country.

What's an Eat-In? It's part protest (of the horrible processed "food" that's currently the norm at most public schools) part public potluck where residents bring their own dishes to share with neighbors. An invite arrived in my Inbox the other day from my CSA and the request was simple:

In exchange, I get to meet members of my community over a potluck lunch, see a movie screening ("What's on your Plate"), cooking demonstrations by the team from "Growing Chefs," and enter a raffle for prizes that include a 18lb ham from Heritage Food and gift vouchers from local eateries. (I'm hoping for Marlow & Sons.)

But the hope is that this grassroots movement of Eat-Ins will send a message to Congress, that we as a nation are demanding school lunch reform. Tater tots, cardboard frozen pizzas, and frozen corn are not a joke anymore: we have a childhood obesity epidemic in this country (the childhood obesity rate has more than tripled since 1980!) and a correlative increase in chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes. Getting healthy, fresh, delicious food into our school lunch cafeterias should be a priority, not an afterthought.

So far, over 10,000 people have signed up for Eat-Ins in all 50 states. To find one in your area, check out this map on the Time For Lunch site—or organize your own.

Far from being an elitist club of European-loving, arugula-chomping, relatively well-off locavores, Slow Food is becoming a diverse movement of Americans of all classes who are demanding that our school cafeterias get a much-needed upgrade. Stay tuned for future coverage of Slow Food actions and activities.

31 August 2009

The Obamas' kitchen garden, the first White House vegetable garden since Eleanor Roosevelt's World War II Victory Garden, has gotten a lot of press this summer —both good and bad.
But this video is the first behind-the-scenes look at all the work that
has gone into it, both by White House staffers (and the First Lady
herself) but also by Bancroft Elementary School students. The video was
released by the White House yesterday, the first day of school for many
D.C. area kids. (Thanks to Obamafoodarama for the tip.)

It's a
heart-warming video, during which you'll see the transformation of the
garden over the course of the summer, from March when Assistant Chef
(and Food Initiative Coordinator) Sam Kass
and his crew amended the soil with sulfated pot ash and crabmeal ("Our
crabs are sourced from the Chesapeake," Kass proudly tells the camera)
to June, when the garden is lush and ready to harvest (the garden
supplies the salad course for a dinner of 20 of the nation's top
economic advisers. Nice!). Throughout First Lady Michelle Obama gets
the students involved: they till, they plant, they harvest, and they
eat. One kid told Kass that she now eats all of her vegetables at
dinner, proving that it's not impossible to instill healthy eating
habits in your kids. (I didn't think it was, but some people have their
doubts.)

We get
a little bit of history on Thomas Jefferson (Kass is using seeds from
Monticello), a little how-to info (the crabmeal gives nitrogen and
calcium to the soil, increasing its fertility), and some honest talk
from First Lady Michelle Obama about her goal of feeding her family "in
a healthy way yet quickly." Despite all the work that goes into
backyard farming, it's true that once the fruits and veggies mature,
there's nothing "faster" than picking them and eating them.

The 1100-square foot garden has produced over 200 pounds of food (as of July) and is still going strong.

One
thing I wish the First Lady and Kass had mentioned in the video is how
little it cost to produce this abundance: less than $200, according to this transcript from an April garden planting with the students. (Tellingly, one of the students guesses that it cost $100,000.)

Granted,
this figure does not include the cost of labor, but as we continue our
nationwide conversations on the importance of eating regionally and
healthily, it's vital that we also focus on the issue of affordability.
Unlike Whole Foods (aka "Whole Paycheck"), which is off limits to much
of this country, backyard gardening is not an elitist endeavor. Nor is
it solely a rural or suburban endeavor, as you know from my past posts on urban gardening. (And here and here.)

So get
out there and get your hands dirty! It's too late this season to start
your own vegetable garden but you can still volunteer at community
gardens (or rooftop gardens such as Rooftop Farm in Brooklyn or one of these eight
around the world). Or simply help out a neighbor by offering to eat his
or her produce. (It's harder to eat it all than you think!)

25 August 2009

Thanks to the slew of recent books and movies about our food supply (led by The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Food Inc.), more Americans than ever are aware of where their food comes from and what’s in it. Readers of this column also know that mass-made juice can be loaded with “flavor packs” and concentrates from up to 12 different countries.

But what about wine?

This may come as a surprise, but most of the wine sold in the U.S.
today has been processed and adulterated beyond recognition by
corporate growers who are intent on maximizing profits. Is nothing
sacred?

Over the last 24 hours, I’ve been devouring Alice Feiring’s excellent book The Battle for Wine and Love: or How I Saved the World from Parkerization
and am quickly discovering that the wine industry in many ways mirrors
the food industry. At many big wineries (both here and around the
world), the life is processed out of the grapes even before they appear
on the vines (with over-irrigation, which
increases yield but also leads to shallow roots and extraripe fruit).
Then, during the fermentation process, meddlesome winemakers add
everything from industrial yeast, bacteria, and enzymes to tannins and
microbial agents—all to “improve” the taste and mouthfeel of a wine,
often so it will appeal to a mass-market palate. (OK: they also throw
in these additives to speed up the fermentation and control the
process. You know, to make the whole thing more scientific.)

Some winemakers are also brandishing hi-tech processes such as
micro-oxygenation and reverse osmosis (also called “ultrafiltration”),
techniques that allow them to further manipulate wines.

Fiering writes:

In today’s globalized wine scene,
winemakers would like to make wine as standardized as possible. Adding
industrial yeast to the wine helps. It ensures that fermentation will
start and finish when the winemaker wants it to, not according to the
whims of nature. This is extremely important when Costco is expecting
its new shipment of wine from Gallo in April—plus, the retailer doesn’t
want the customer to bring the wine back complaining that it doesn’t
taste like last year’s model.

Today, there are hundreds of industrial yeast replicas, including one genetically modified strain that was recently approved for use in the U.S.

At issue here is not food safety or even nutrition (though I wouldn’t be surprised if organic, biodynamic and naturally-made
wines turn out to cause less of a hangover and are proven to contain
more antioxidants than their processed cousins) but diversity and
complexity of flavor.

Feiring believes (and I agree) that these wines are uniformly bland
and characterless—they are artificial, their unique terroir masked by
the introduction of such “designer yeasts,” chestnut tannins, oak
extracts, and other indignities. Often, as Feiring shows, scheming
winemakers mess with their vintages solely to achieve a higher score
from influential wine critic Robert Parker (which, of course, leads to
a surge in sales). After Parker awarded Helen Turley’s rich, syrupy
1993 Zinfandel a whopping 95 points, for example, he started a trend
that hasn’t stopped to this day. “The paradigm of a great wine shifted
to one big, jammy, oaky fruit bomb,” writes Fiering. “And the whole
industry adjusted accordingly.”

To me, the central dilemma with Big Wine is actually one of
transparency. Though I can choose to drink wines that are made in the
natural Old World-style, there is no wine labeling law that requires
that GMO yeast, tannins, or bacteria (or new-fangled filtering
technologies) be disclosed. Even artisanal producers have begun using
these “scientific” techniques—but it is unlikely, as Feiring points
out, that they’ll divulge them on labels anytime soon.

Part of the pleasure (and risk) of drinking wine comes from savoring
its subtle flavors and the ineffable qualities bestowed on the grapes
by the terroir, the weather, and the irrigation (and cultivation)
methods. Wine made in the Old World style is alive—it changes from year
to year and even, once uncorked, from day to day. It has a sense of
place.

Feiring’s book is an Omnivore’s Dilemma for the world of
wine and winemaking. I just hope it raises the same level of awareness
and appreciation for Old World winemaking techniques as Pollan’s book
has for polyculture and sustainably-farmed, honest-to-goodness food.

In the meantime, I’ll continue to seek out small producers who create authentic natural wines—people like Oregon vintners Russ Raney of Evesham Wood, Brian O’Donnell of Belle Pente, Jason Letts at Eyrie, and John Paul at Cameron.
(These wines are at the forefront of my mind since I’ve just returned
from Oregon. Know any amazing natural wines from other regions? Please
share them below.)

18 August 2009

The wines at Belle Pente (beautiful slope), a 70-acre farm off a dusty road in Carlton, came highly recommended by Russ Raney.
The grapes here are organic and the winery is biodynamic; winemaker
Brian O’Donnell is a recent member of the Deep Roots Coalition.
Coincidentally, I’d read a brief article in the Oregonian
a few days earlier about how Brian and his wife Jill have begun
diversifying their vineyard by raising goats and Highland cattle.

Below: Sheep and chardonnay at Belle Pente

Belle Pente is not easy to find, nor is
there a tasting room, per se. But we had called ahead and so Brian was
expecting us. As we drove up a gravel road, we sped past the
O’Donnell’s farm and cellar, it turns out. (After visiting a few of the
bigger area wineries that day, we’d come to expect a sign, if not a
parking lot.) It wasn’t until we’d reached the crest of the beautiful
slope (from which we had a magnificent view of the valley) that we
realized Brian had been waving us down from his tractor.

“Vineyards are inherently a monoculture,” Brian told us, as he poured us a glass of dry Muscat from 2007.
He and Jill are trying to change that by adding livestock and native
plants to their winemaking repertoire. They’ve had the goats for
fifteen years—they got them originally to clear the land of broadleaf
weeds so they could minimize the use of herbicide, but they also milked
them, making cheese for home use. Whereas the goats prefer broadleaves,
the sheep like grass—so both animals help maintain the vineyard, while
also adding to the “manure mix.” Ultimately, the grass-fed sheep are
sold at auction for their meat. “They turn our pasture grass into food
for humans,” said Brian.

The chickens, which are a relatively recent addition, eat the annoying cutworms (which
had been nibbling on the tender new growth of the vines at night)—the
eggs, said Brian, are a nice side benefit. (They sell the surplus to
neighbors.) The Highland cows are also brush eaters; their manure goes
into making some of the biodynamic preparations, so the O’Donnells have
no need to import it. (Eventually the cows, too, will be sold for
meat.) In an attempt to restore as much of an indigenous natural
habitat of the region as possible, he’s also begun planting native grasses
such as Blue Wildrye, Tufted Hairgrass, and Slender Wheatgrass in the
aisles between the vines. Brian also supplements the animals’ diet with
white grape skins, which aren’t fermented.

This sort of integrated farming
is a key tenet of biodynamic farming. It’s also a smart prevention
strategy. “Introducing (or restoring) biodiversity is a key to
maintaining a healthy, thriving vineyard environment that will
ultimately require fewer costly interventions in terms of pest and
disease control,” Brian said.

The Muscat was crisp and floral. Belle Pente is one of only three Oregon winemakers to make a Muscat,
a wine that’s typically found in Northern Italy (sometimes in the
Alsace). The grapes for this vintage come from a vineyard down the road
in the Yamhill-Carlton District, where the vines go deep into the soil,
past thick stones and marine sediments.

We tried a 2007 Pinot, which had a minerally character, and a 2006 pinot gris reserve, which, Brian told us, had a a more Alsatian style. Next we sipped the Murto—a
jammy pinot that’s sourced from an estate in the Dundee Hills where the
soil is volcanic. It had a spicy kick and a deep earthiness; I could’ve
easily had a full glass. Or two.

Since I wasn’t driving, I also wasn’t spitting as my boyfriend and
Brian so elegantly were. (I have yet to master the art of elegantly
spitting. Plus, when a wine is so delish, spitting seems like a
travesty—even if it is early afternoon and you haven’t eaten lunch yet.)

So forgive me, because this is where my notes lose their precision.
I did scribble in my notebook that we talked about the principals of
biodynamics, which include lunar cycles, preparations (spraying the
vines with silica and highly concentrated compost) and integrated
farming techniques. I asked Brian how a New Yorker like him ended up on
a remote vineyard in Oregon (he fell in love with wines while working
for Intel and HP in Mountain View, California in the 80’s), and, as we
tasted more wines—an Estate Reserve Pinot Noir with dark black fruit and an excellent estate grown Chardonnay
that had just the right balance of oak (it’s barrel fermented but with
old oak—a 50/50 mix of French and Oregon oak)—we discussed other
risk-taking winemakers such as Branco Cotar in Slovenia and Gravner in Italy. (Gravner, Brian said, is “pushing the envelope.”)

Though
there is something exceedingly romantic and right about drinking a wine
in the region where the grapes are harvested, I had to ask: where can I
find Belle Pente wines in New York City? Surprisingly, they are
distributed to 15 states—including New York. Among the NYC restaurants
who carry it are such foodie destinations as Cru, Gramercy, and 11
Madison. Still, unable to resist, we bought a few bottles for friends
and family before thanking Brian and bidding him farewell.

14 August 2009

Last week, while visiting my family in Salem, I made a stop at Evesham Wood
(one of my favorite U.S. wineries) to talk to owner and winemaker Russ
Raney. (Full disclosure: he and his wife attended the same church as
my folks so I’ve been a champion of their wines since they founded
Evesham Wood in the mid-1980’s.) I was eager to taste his certified
organic pinot noirs and French-style chardonnay but also to hear how
the recent heat wave had affected his vineyards and the grapes.

I’d
noticed, as we drove up the sloping hillside towards the Raney house
(the wine cellar, which is modest in size, is appropriately tucked
under the Raney home), how green and lush the vineyard looked. It was a
hot, dry Oregon summer day and there appeared to be no sprinklers or
irrigation pipes anywhere in sight.

When I asked Russ his secret, he
launched into an animated discussion about the importance of not
irrigating. It turns out Evesham Wood is a charter member of the Deep
Roots Coalition, a group of Oregon growers who spurn artificial
irrigation for environmental reasons but also because it affects the
resiliency of the vines and, ultimately, the taste of the wine.

“If you irrigate, you can’t taste the
difference in the wine from year to year,” Russ said. (Which is sort of
the whole point of making and drinking wine, if you think about it: a
wine’s unique taste comes from its particular terroir and each vintage
is different.) If you don’t irrigate, the vines are forced to go deeper
into the soil to find water. They also find minerals there that add to
the grapes’ complex flavors.

“The roots grow shallower if they’re
irrigated, and they get used to the water,” Russ explained. Whereas,
during the week of 105-degree-plus weather, Evesham Wood’s vines—some
of which reach as far as five feet down—were just fine because their
roots are getting adequate moisture from the soil. By comparison,
irrigated vines in the Willamette Valley reach only 14 inches below the
surface, tops.

This is why wines from places like Walla Walla, an arid wine region in eastern Washington, are suspect (and, it turns out, controversial)—not only from a water conservation perspective
but also from an old-world winemaking point-of-view. Deep Roots purists
(the practice is also known as “dry farming”) believe wine should not
be grown in dry regions, period. The vines that get watered with drip
irrigation remind me of humans’ reliance on antibiotics: the
more we take indiscriminately, the more our bodies require to wipe out
serious bacterial infections such as MRSA.
Whereas people whose immune systems are strong from years of taking
good care of themselves don’t need antibiotics when they get a simple
sinus infection or bacterial infection. Their roots are deep.

We tasted some wines directly from the
barrels, including a French-style (unoaked) chardonnay and several
pinots, discussed the merits of screw caps (best for young whites and
rosés, says Russ, not so much for anything that’s red or aged over a
few years), and got Russ’s recommendations for other Oregon wineries
who are making phenomenal old-world style wines. One of these was Belle
Pente Vineyard in Carlton…

17 July 2009

It's not easy staying on top of food politics and food safety news these days, but it's a task I welcome with this new gig at theFasterTimes.com ("a new type of newspaper for a new type of world"). Though TFT only launched last week, I've been blogging for some time now about issues as diverse as Sysco (and how it works with small-scale regional farms), the lengths I'll go to get a fix of raw milk, and low-income locavores.

Check it out, and while you're there, take a look at what my food colleagues are doing: former Saveur editor Sarah Karnasiewicz covers street food, Melissa Clark (a regular contributor to the Times' Dining section) writes about her snacking habits, Scott Gold (aka the Shameless Carnivore) covers, simply, "meat," and so on.

02 May 2009

When I first came to New York City almost 15 years ago, I was dismayed by how few independent coffee shops there were. I liked Oren’s Daily Roast, and when I moved to Brooklyn, I frequented Ozzie’s in Park Slope. And then there was that strange café run by Moonies in midtown that brewed Green Mountain coffee from Vermont. But other than that, coffee in this city was mediocre at best. I couldn't understand why some savvy entrepreneur didn't open a Pacific Northwest-style café—they'd make a killing.

Well, a lot has happened over the past 8 or so years, starting with Ninth Street Espresso, Joe the Art of Coffee, and Gimme! (in Williamsburg). But even since I reported my story on coffee cuppings last year, the number of "third-wave" coffee shops here has mushroomed. I can't keep up with the openings, mostly in Brooklyn, but some in Manhattan. (There are also a number of existing cafes that are switching to higher-quality roasters, such as City Girl on Orchard St., which now serves Stumptown.) In short, it's a good time to be a coffee drinker in New York City. (It's about time.)

That was the gist of a panel I was on yesterday at the first ever NYC Coffee Summit, hosted by the International Culinary Center and Edible Manhattan. I spoke about coffee education from the consumer's perspective: how can the typical NYC coffee drinker learn to distinguish between an Ethiopian Yirgacheffe and a Brazilian pulped natural of the Catuai variety? How can he or she learn how to make a great cup of coffee at home? My answer: chat up your barista, go to cuppings (and "home brewing" classes), and read coffee blogs.

Here's a list of cuppings and classes offered (mostly for free) in NYC and environs:

• Counter Culture coffee holds weekly cuppings on Friday at noon at Everyman Espresso (136 E 13th St between Third and Fourth Aves) and at 6PM at Roots & Vines (409 Grand St at Clinton St..) In June, they’ll start public cuppings at their brand new New York training facility.

• Café Grumpy has cuppings once a week at both locations—the dates and times are posted on their Web site. They'll also be hosting barista classes and home brewing classe @ the Chelsea location as soon as their back room renovation is complete.

• Joe the Art of Coffee has cuppings the first Monday of every month at 6:30 at the 13th street training facility, but also classes on "How to Brew Coffee at Home." (The next one is May 12 at 8:15 PM.)

• Intelligentsia has weekly cuppings at their new NYC "training lab" but also brewed-coffee tastings (the different profiles from french press vs chemex, for example), espresso tastings (four different single origins in a tasting), food and coffee pairings, plus home brewing classes, latte art classes, espresso classes, and "seed-to-cup" classes. (Daniel Humphries, now Intell's NYC guy, tells me he'll have another coffee and cheese pairing soon—not sure if that'll be under the aegis of the NYC Coffee Society or Intell.)

• Gimme! in Williamsburg has cuppings every so often—but they rarely advertise, so if you live in the 'hood, just ask a barista.

• Stumptown will start regular cuppings at Café Pedlar in Cobble Hill (or is it Carroll Gardens?) soon. (Probably Saturday afternoons.) A few of their NYC accounts hold cuppings: Variety Cafe (one of my new favorites), and Marlow and Sons (81 Broadway in Williamsburg). Lizz Hudson from Stumptown is doing a cupping on May 13 @ Spoon Catering at 17 W. 20th St.

For more on NYC's vibrant coffee scene (and its early history), see Liz Clayton's article in the latest issue of Edible Manhattan.

And finally, for those of you who could use a guide to all these third-wave cafés, check out Anne Nylander and Neil Oney's NYC and Brooklyn coffee tours. (Anne and Neil own TampTamp, Inc., a specialty coffee service firm.)

One more thing: If you're truly obsessed with coffee, James Hoffman's blog is an education in and of itself. Hoffman, who won the World Barista Championship in 2007, is based in London and I can guarantee that he's more obsessed with coffee than you are. He posts about barista championships, food chemistry, roasting and latte art, but don't miss the videocasts of him brewing coffee with the Chemex, Moka Pot, and even with snow.

Now, it's time for another cup of Ecco Caffé's Fazenda Serra do Bone from Brazil...

03 April 2009

Any self-respecting Michael Pollan-subscribing locavore knows that when it comes to supporting local farmers and artisanal food makers, small equals good while big equals bad—even if big is organic.

And this binary formula must hold true if the gargantuan company of the moment is Sysco, the $37 billion food distributor known for trucking frozen foods and canned goods to most fast food restaurants, university cafeterias, and hospitals around this sprawling country—not exactly bastions of fine dining, or places where fresh produce even makes an appearance on menus. (Before he died a few years ago, founder John Baugh, who started the company in 1970, was even known for saying, “Frozen foods taste better than anything I could grow in my garden.”)

But now that many big box companies have jumped on the sustainable, organic bandwagon—Wal-Mart now sells organic produce, and most of the 800 Chipotle outlets in this country get some of their produce from local farms—what’s a card-carrying Locavore to think? (The Charlottesville, VA, Chipotle even sources its pork from Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm in Virginia—heralded by Pollan in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” for being a sustainable, pasture-based farm that's "beyond organic.")

A cynic would say these companies are just capitalizing on a consumer trend—that they’re more keen on making money off of conscientious shoppers who are nevertheless too lazy to sign up for a CSA share (or shop at their local farmers’ market) than they are committed to supporting local food economies.

But would those contrarians be correct in this case? Actually, Sysco, long the epitome of industrial agribusiness, maligned by sustainable-food activists and eaters alike, turns out to be doing a damned good job of nurturing regional and local hubs. Under the leadership of progressive CEO Rick Schnieders, the company now partners with Amish and Mennonite farmers in Kansas; artisanal bakers, coffee roasters, and dairies in Oregon; and hundreds of small New England farmers. Some of our country’s top restaurants now get their produce and other hard-to-source ingredients from Sysco: Daniel in New York and Nobu and Gordon Ramsay’s in Los Angeles, for example. Dan Barber (the chef at Blue Hill Stone Barns, recently featured on Top Chef) is a fan.

In fact, in the April issue of Saveur, writer Indira Sen tracks down Schnieders at the Sysco headquarters to see why Barber recently praised the company (to much controversy, she reports) at the Slow Food conference in San Francisco last fall.

The main reason is the company’s fresh produce division, called FreshPoint, which has 35 or so hubs around the country. The Connecticut division is run by David Yandow, a former farmer himself, who sees no conflict between working for Sysco and supporting regional farmers (who, by the way, he’s worked with for most of his life). When I spoke to Yandow last year, he spoke of the long-term relationships he has with these farmers—he and his brothers sold their 130-year-old company to Sysco in 2005 but still run it pretty much the same way they always have, selling their seasonal produce to New England restaurants, grocery stores, and universities. Only now, Yandow has the resources (thanks to Sysco) to train farmers on good agricultural practices and advise them on what to grow, based on what regional chefs are demanding.

But Sysco is not distributing only locally, of course. It transports food from coast to coast all the time—organic salad greens from California to the East coast, for example, and not just in the winter. And how Green can you be when you’re transporting hundreds of millions of goods around the country every day? Sen, a skeptic herself, confronts Schneiders on this issue. By his calculations, though, Sysco logs less “food miles,” driving 1700 cases of organic greens from California to New York per case, than a farmer who drives eight cases 40 miles to a farmer’s market and back. (Paul Roberts makes a similar case in his Mother Jones cover story this month.)

Schneiders is a pragmatist. If giant food companies like Sysco are here to stay—and they are, because our sprawling country and industrialized food system rely upon their efficient hub-and-spoke networks—why not reform them, imbuing them with at least some of the values of the sustainable-food movement? And what’s wrong with making money while doing the right thing?

Purists may still scoff that Sysco remains the bad guy, that the only way for this country’s food system to change is if everyone (including chefs) buys produce exclusively from our farmers’ markets or via a CSA share. But this is a Romantic notion, one that doesn’t take into account the fact that there are billions of people to feed in this country—most of whom cannot afford to pay $1,000 up-front for a share in a CSA. (Or who don't have a farmer's market in their neighborhood.) At a time when family-run farms need all the business they can get, it may only be through the distribution efforts (regional and national) of giants like Sysco that they can make a living.

22 March 2009

Raw milk continues to be a hot topic in the news—especially now that Connecticut is talking about restricting the sale of raw milk to farms and farmers' markets. (Connecticut, like California, has been one of the few states where farmers can sell raw milk in health food stores, as long as it is clearly labeled as such.)

On Friday, the Brian Lehrer show tackled the issue, inviting NYU nutrition professor Marion Nestle to weigh in ("I see no reason why we can't produce safe raw milk") and Connecticut state representative and economist Diana Urban, who sets the record straight re: the E. coli outbreak in CT last fall that was traced to a dairy in Simsbury. (The bottles of milk were not labeled as raw, which is what CT state law requires. "It was to do with poor management," Urban says.)

The whole segment is worth listening to if only to hear listener Rosalind tell how she uprooted her boys from NYC when they were diagnosed with ADD and ADHD and gave them a life of raw milk on a farm in the country (and other real foods, one would assume) instead of pharmaceuticals. Her enthusiasm for the beverage ("it contains more omega 3s than we could get anywhere else!") is contagious.

Urban, who grew up on a Long Island dairy farm drinking unpasteurized milk, explains why the law (should it pass) would be the death of small farmers in her state: they are living on such small margins as it is that they may have to go out of business if they can't sell at Whole Foods and other health food stores.

As one CT dairy farmer in this NYT article says, "If you don't want to drink it, don't drink it."

01 March 2009

Sally Fallon's talk last week inspired me to delve into the latest research on cholesterol and statins. Though this investigative article is over a year old (it was BusinessWeek's cover story last January 17th), it's one of the most thorough I could find on the subject of statins (specifically, Pfizer's blockbuster drug Lipitor) and their inability to significantly reduce heart attacks in any but those who have already had heart disease.

Journalist John Carey's main points, in case you don't have time to read the whole thing:

1. Pfizer has mislead the public (as most pharmaceutical companies do) by using this dramatic statistic in its ads: Lipitor reduces the risk of heart attack by 36%. Read the fine print, and you'll see that in a large clinical study, only 1 person out of 100 was spared a heart attack after taking Lipitor for 3 years. (In scientific parlance, Lipitor has a very high NNT—number needed to treat—of 100. Compare that to the standard antibiotic therapy to treat H. pylori stomach bacteria, which has an NNT of 1.1—10 out of 11 people will be cured.)

2. 10-15% of statin users suffer side effects including muscle pain, cognitive impairments, and sexual dysfunction. Small prices to pay if you're definitely preventing a heart attack. But if after 3 years of these unhappy developments you only reduce your risk of coronary events by 1 out of 100—you have to ask yourself if Lipitor is worth taking. (Not to mention its high price tag—if not to you directly, then to insurance companies, Medicare, and ultimately back to you via taxes.)

3. Though Lipitor indisputably lowers cholesterol levels, many scientists are raising doubts that we need to drive down our cholesterol levels in the first place. (i.e. the whole cholesterol hypothesis of heart disease is under intense scrutiny.) As Dr. Ronald M. Krauss, director of atherosclerosis research at the Oakland Research Institute says in the article, "When you look at patients with heart disease, their cholesterol levels are not that [much] higher than those without heart disease." John Carey, the reporter, continues:

Compare countries, for example. Spaniards have LDL levels similar to Americans', but less than half the rate of heart disease. The Swiss have even higher cholesterol levels, but their rates of heart disease are also lower. Australian aborigines have low cholesterol but high rates of heart disease.

It's starting to look like Sally Fallon and Mary Enig, Gary Taubes, Uffe Ravnskov (author of the out-of-print "Cholesterol Myths"), and other "cholesterol skeptics" (as they're known) should not have been so quickly dismissed.

Tall and regal, with a mane of white hair, Fallon stepped up to the podium and began detailing the history of the lipid hypothesis, which is, of course, still accepted as the gospel Truth in the U.S. Americans ate a diet high in saturated fats in the early 20th century (to illustrate, Fallon read a list of buttery, creamy, lard-filled recipes from an 1895 cookbook published by the Baptist society of Illinois), yet the first recorded heart attack wasn't until 1921. By the time Americans had shifted their diets to include more vegetable oils and processed foods in the 1960s, 500,000 were dying of heart attack.

Two theories emerged as to why so many Americans were suddenly dying of heart disease. One was that vegetable oils, which had recently been introduced into the diet, were to blame; the other was the diet-heart theory (aka the lipid hypothesis)—that Americans were eating too much saturated fat and had high serum cholesterol levels. Despite the fact that there was little evidence for the latter (in fact, a study by Harvard pathologists Lande and Sperry of 1936 showed that there was no correlation between cholesterol levels and atherosclerosis), the lipid hypothesis was the theory that was promoted "with great vigor," according to Fallon. An organization was even founded to promote it and something called the "prudent diet": the American Heart Association.

I won't reiterate the entire sordid saga—which is full of industry pressure (Proctor & Gamble, et all), doctored study results, and plenty of medical professionals who were skeptical of the lipid hypothesis, including the American Medical Association—but I did have two "A-ha" moments. One was when Fallon told us how Mary Enig, who did her PhD thesis on trans fats at the University of Maryland, realized that most foods that contained trans fats (margarine, vegetable shortening, cookies, chips, etc.) were not labeled as such—food companies actually listed trans fats as saturated fats until the 1980's. So researchers using government databases (in particular, one called the National Health and Nutrition
Examination Survey or NHANES II) came to the erroneous conclusion that saturated fats were causing disease—when in fact trans fats were to blame. Every epidemiological study done before 1980 (that had to do with saturated fat intake and heart disease), Fallon says, is extremely suspect.

The other was that the Framingham Heart study (one of the three studies most often cited by our government to bolster the lipid hypothesis) was presented in a misleading way. (See slide #13 on Fallon's PPT presentation.) The intervals on the bar graph start out evenly spaced (with 30 points between each cholesterol number), but the final interval is a whopping 830 points—making the increase in heart disease at the upper-end of the cholesterol spectrum appear drastic. Fallon showed us what the heart disease line would look like if the intervals were evenly spaced, with 30 points between cholesterol numbers: it's almost horizontal. The upshot: if your cholesterol level is 1000 (a very rare condition) you have a slightly increased risk of heart disease.

I'm going to stop there, because I hope to write more about this controversial subject in the future. But for those who are interested, here's a link to "The Oiling of America" talk on DVD and an article version is on the Weston A. Price site.